Surviving Sudden Environmental Change: Answers From Archaeology: Understanding Hazards, Mitigating Impacts, Avoiding Disasters - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160732167X ISBN 13: 9781607321675

Verlag: UNIV PR OF COLORADO, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities-ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory-faced and coped with such dangers.

Many disasters originate from a force of nature, such as an earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, volcanic eruption, drought, or flood. But that is only half of the story; decisions of people and their particular cultural lifeways are the rest. Sociocultural factors are essential in understanding risk, impact, resilience, reactions, and recoveries from massive sudden environmental changes. By using deep-time perspectives provided by interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides a rich temporal background to the human experience of environmental hazards and disasters. In addition, each chapter is followed by an abstract summarizing the important implications for today's management practices and providing recommendations for policy makers. Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jago Cooper is an Arts and Humanities Research Council research associate and lectures at the Institute for Archaeology, University College London. Payson Sheets is a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Surviving Sudden Environmental Change

Understanding Hazards, Mitigating Impacts, Avoiding Disasters

By David Abbott, John Marty Anderies, Jago Cooper, Andrew Dugmore, Ben Fitzhugh, Michelle Hegmon, Scott Ingram, Keith Kintigh, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, Stephanie Kulow, Emily McClung de Tapia, Thomas McGovern, Cathryn Meegan, Ben Nelson, Margaret Nelson, Tate Paulette, Matthew Peeples, Jeffrey Quilter, Charles Redman, Daniel Sandweiss, Payson Sheets, Katherine Spielmann, Colleen Strawhacker, Orri Vésteinsson

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2012 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-167-5

Contents

FOREWORD Thomas H. McGovern, 
CHAPTER ABSTRACTS, 
INTRODUCTION: Learning to Live with the Dangers of Sudden Environmental Change Payson Sheets and Jago Cooper, 
CHAPTER 1. Hazards, Impacts, and Resilience among Hunter-Gatherers of the Kuril Islands Ben Fitzhugh, 
CHAPTER 2. Responses to Explosive Volcanic Eruptions by Small to Complex Societies in Ancient Mexico and Central America Payson Sheets, 
CHAPTER 3. Black Sun, High Flame, and Flood: Volcanic Hazards in Iceland Andrew Dugmore and Orri Vésteinsson, 
CHAPTER 4. Fail to Prepare, Then Prepare to Fail: Rethinking Threat, Vulnerability, and Mitigation in the Precolumbian Caribbean Jago Cooper, 
CHAPTER 5. Collation, Correlation, and Causation in the Prehistory of Coastal Peru Daniel H. Sandweiss and Jeffrey Quilter, 
CHAPTER 6. Silent Hazards, Invisible Risks: Prehispanic Erosion in the Teotihuacan Valley, Central Mexico Emily McClung de Tapia, 
CHAPTER 7. Domination and Resilience in Bronze Age Mesopotamia Tate Paulette, 
CHAPTER 8. Long-Term Vulnerability and Resilience: Three Examples from Archaeological Study in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico Margaret C. Nelson, Michelle Hegmon, Keith W. Kintigh, Ann P. Kinzig, Ben A. Nelson, John Marty Anderies, David A. Abbott, Katherine A. Spielmann, Scott E. Ingram, Matthew A. Peeples, Stephanie Kulow, Colleen A. Strawhacker, and Cathryn Meegan, 
CHAPTER 9. Social Evolution, Hazards, and Resilience: Some Concluding Thoughts Timothy A. Kohler, 
CHAPTER 10. Global Environmental Change, Resilience, and Sustainable Outcomes Charles L. Redman, 
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Hazards, Impacts, and Resilience among Hunter-Gatherers of the Kuril Islands

Ben Fitzhugh

ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CATASTROPHIC EVENTS IN THE HUNTER-GATHERER CONTEXT

This chapter explores hunter-gatherer vulnerability in the context of relative isolation and a highly dynamic natural environment. The setting is the Kuril Islands of the Northwest Pacific, and the data set is a 4,000year record of human settlement and environmental history generated by the Kuril Biocomplexity Project, a large, interdisciplinary, and international research effort fielded from 2006 to 2008. The presupposition entering this project was that this relatively isolated, volcanic, earthquake- and tsunami-prone subarctic region should be among the more difficult habitats for hunter-gatherer populations to occupy consistently and, as a result, that the archaeological record should reflect periodic abandonments, at least in the most isolated (and smallest) central islands. The results of this study speak less to this heuristic presupposition than to the idea of resilience in the face of ecological impoverishment, catastrophic events, and climate changes. The history we are uncovering highlights the importance of linked social, economic, and demographic processes in conditioning vulnerability and shaping people's resilience in the environment.

Hazards and disasters are the focus of increasing interest in natural and social science, stimulated by growing media attention to disasters around the world. Calls for improved prediction of catastrophic events have generated enhanced support for retrospective studies of historical pattern and periodicity in earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, drought, climate change, and other natural hazards. Social science has entered this arena to better understand human responses to hazardous events and environmental change, most recently calling for more integrated research into the socio-natural dynamics of disasters (Blaikie et al. 1994; Oliver-Smith 1996;Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002; Sidle et al. 2004; Torrence and Grattan 2002). This latest turn recognizes that disasters are complex outcomes of linked social and environmental processes and that these histories often condition the severity of impacts on humans in the aftermath of extreme events.

Efforts to understand the socio-environmental dynamics of disasters have tended to focus on agricultural and industrial societies (but see Saltonstall and Carver 2002; Sheets 1999). From a comparative archaeological study of socioecological responses to explosive volcanic eruptions in Mesoamerica, Payson Sheets (1999) suggests that the impacts of such catastrophic events will scale with the degree of organizational complexity and investment in "built environment." He argues that small-scale egalitarian societies, at least in Central America, had the most organizational resilience. If Sheets is correct in this conclusion, we should expect to see similar degrees of resilience in other contexts in which small-scale societies were exposed to catastrophic events. The Kuril Islands offer another case for investigating the resilience of such societies.

THE KURIL ISLANDS

The Kuril Islands provide a semi-controlled setting for investigating the historical impacts of volcanism, tsunamis, and climate change on maritime hunter-gatherers over the past 4,000 years. As a group of ecologically simple and geographically small volcanic islands stretched across 1,100 km of stormy, subarctic ocean, these islands would seem to epitomize an extremely vulnerable environment for human settlement. The relative isolation of the central Kurils may explain why they were left unoccupied until roughly 4,000 years ago, a barrier rather than a bridge between the Japanese archipelago and Kamchatka (figure 1.1).

In biogeographical terms, the Kuril Islands are "stepping stone islands" between Hokkaido and the Kamchatka Peninsula — serving as both potential conduit and filter for the movement of plants, animals, and people between these larger landmasses. The islands serve largely as a filter to the expansion of land-based plant and animal taxa limited in their ability to disperse across wide channels with fast marine currents. As a result, the islands from Iturup northeast to Onekotan have relatively low terrestrial biodiversity and are dominated by tundra meadow and alpine ecosystems and a few terrestrial mammals uncharacteristically good at colonizing new lands, such as fox and vole. Birds, by contrast, are abundant and diverse in the absence of most predators, and the Kurils support dozens of species of resident seabirds and migratory waterfowl (Hacker 1951). Marine mammals are also well represented today around the shores and near-shore waters of many of the Kuril Islands. Sea lions, fur seals, and harbor seals are the most common species today, especially in the central islands, where they haul out in large numbers and raise pups in the summer. Sea otters are abundant in some areas — especially around the northern and southern islands — while absent in others. Their distribution seems to reflect the ecological differences in shellfish and fish productivity and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV PR OF COLORADO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 160732167X
• ISBN 13: 9781607321675
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Herausgeber: Cooper Jago, Sheets Payson
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland