The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions
The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions

Author: Daniel Contreras

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-08-25

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1317450620

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The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

Human-Environment Interactions
Human-Environment Interactions

Author: Eduardo S. Brondízio

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 9400747802

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Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Understanding Society and Natural Resources
Understanding Society and Natural Resources

Author: Michael J. Manfredo

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9401789592

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In this edited open access book leading scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds wrestle with social science integration opportunities and challenges. This book explores the growing concern of how best to achieve effective integration of the social science disciplines as a means for furthering natural resource social science and environmental problem solving. The chapters provide an overview of the history, vision, advances, examples and methods that could lead to integration. The quest for integration among the social sciences is not new. Some argue that the social sciences have lagged in their advancements and contributions to society due to their inability to address integration related issues. Integration merits debate for a number of reasons. First, natural resource issues are complex and are affected by multiple proximate driving social factors. Single disciplinary studies focused at one level are unlikely to provide explanations that represent this complexity and are limited in their ability to inform policy recommendations. Complex problems are best explored across disciplines that examine social-ecological phenomenon from different scales. Second, multi-disciplinary initiatives such as those with physical and biological scientists are necessary to understand the scope of the social sciences. Too frequently there is a belief that one social scientist on a multi-disciplinary team provides adequate social science representation. Third, more complete models of human behavior will be achieved through a synthesis of diverse social science perspectives.

Time Resources, Society and Ecology
Time Resources, Society and Ecology

Author: Tommy Carlstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-18

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1000698912

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Originally published in 1982, Time Resources, Society and Ecology examines and seeks to examine the time dimension in terms of the ecology, technology, social organization and spatial structure of the human habitat. Approaches to time resources – sociological time-budget studies, anthropological activity analysis, and economic analysis of money allocation – have been limited by their sectoral scope or their failure to relate effectively to the processes of social interaction, technological change and environmental structure. In this book, the book’s articulation of time resources is developed in a general theoretical framework of action and interaction in time and space. The book examines constraints and possibilities facing preindustrial societies and throws light on the impact of technology on modern societies. Basic models of time allocation are presented, and, finally, a cross-cultural comparison is made of the mobilization of time resources in preindustrial societies. Geographers, social anthropologists and human ecologists should find this work directly relevant to their interest in understanding the interactions between man and environment.