1,721,156 research outputs found
Correlating Landesque Capital and Ethnopolitical Integration in Pre-Columbian South America
No full textTowards a global history of agricultural systems
No full textMaps of past agricultural systems suggest two rapid changes: around 1500 CE, as European colonization led to demographic and agricultural collapse in South America, 1870 to 1920 CE, as industrialization and steam transport resulted in a global division of labor
Climate and causation in the Swedish Iron Age : Learning from the present to understand the past
No full textThe paper reassesses the role of climate as a factor shaping changes in settlement and landscape in the Swedish Iron Age (500 BC to AD 1050). Two reasons motivate this re-evaluation. First, high-resolution data based on climate proxies from the natural sciences are now increasingly available. Second, the climate-related social sciences have yielded conceptual and theoretical developments regarding vulnerability and adaptability in the present and recent past, creating new ways to analyse the effects of climatic versus societal factors on societies in the more distant past. Recent research in this field is evaluated and the explicitly climate deterministic standpoint of many recent natural science texts is criticized. Learning from recent approaches to climate change in the social sciences is crucial for understanding society–climate relationships in the past. The paper concludes that we are not yet in a position to fully evaluate the role of the new evidence of abrupt climate change in 850 BC, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Regarding the crisis in the mid first millennium AD, however, new climate data indicate that a dust veil in AD 536–537 might have aggravated the economic and societal crisis known from previous research
Review of Sing C. Chew ‘The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes and Systems Transformation
No full textStrip fields in an Iron-Age context : A case study from Västergötland, Sweden
Get PDFAs part of a project on the origin of subdivided fields in Western Sweden some surprisingly old planned fields have been investigated in the southern parts of the province of Västergötland. A type of large fossilised field consisting of long strips bounded by banks of stone and earth was found while searching for partially deserted medieval sub-divided fields. The breadth of the strips varies from approximately 7 to 40 metres. To judge from the remaining evidence, the fields often covered areas of over 50 hectares. The spatial relationship between the fields and other ancient monuments points to a date in the last centuries B.C. This dating has also been confirmed by radio-carbon datings from field boundaries, indicating a use in the period 500 B.C. to A.D. 200. The layout of the strips follows geometrical principles rather than the terrain and gives the impression of deliberate planning according to some yet unknown principle. Some of the localities consist of broad strips which have functioned as frameworks within which subdivision into property and/or working plots has later been developed. This land division seems mainly to have its origin in the need to regulate the rights to land. Strips are often too broad to have been working plots and they lack any sign of traction implements. All evidence so far points to collectively organised, subdivided field systems which have many traits in common with the medieval open fields. A metrological analysis shows that the fields were planned, measured and subsequently subdivided. The finds raise principal questions concerning the origin of subdivided fields and of individual and collective rights in the landscape. Two directions for discussion emerge. One concerns the antecedent forms in the landscape and the circumstances under which these land divisions were carried out, the other concerns the principal relations between these field systems and later subdivided fields
Slaves : inequality and sustainable agriculture in pre- colonial West Africa
No full textThe relation between social and economic inequality and the environment is one of the most central research questions in historical political ecology. This chapter addresses the issue from the perspective of a specific social form (slave soci eties), with a focus on a specific environmental issue (soil degradation). It discusses the measures that people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took to ensure sustainable yields through investments in landesque capital. The central question is how slavery was related to soil and water conservation in West Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. There are two underlying arguments. First, while we have indisputable examples of how exploitative social and economic systems have led to degraded environments and to environmental load displacement, this relation needs to be examined critically and empirically, rather than taken for granted. Second, in the current urge to highlight “traditional” soil and water conservation practices for development purposes, there is a need for a better understanding of the political economy and social structures in which these practices once developed
Vems röst är det vi hör? Icke-statliga organisationer, nätverkande, agitation och problemet att representera andra
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