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Cultivated Landscapes Of Middle America On The Eve Of Conquest
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Author :Thomas M. Whitmore Publisher :Oxford University Press on Demand ISBN 13 :9780199244539 Total Pages :311 pages Book Rating :4.2/5 (445 download)
Book Synopsis Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest by : Thomas M. Whitmore
Download or read book Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest written by Thomas M. Whitmore and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2001 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on this wealth of data the authors make a contribution to the debate about resource, land, and population in the Americas."--BOOK JACKET.
Book Synopsis Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes by : William M. Denevan
Download or read book Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes written by William M. Denevan and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes examines Indian agriculture in South America. The focus is on field types and field technologies, including agricultural landforms such as terraces, canals, and drained fields, which have persisted for hundreds of years. What emerges is a picture of mostly successful indigenous farming practices in difficult environments--rain forests, savannahs, swamps, rugged mountains, and deserts.
Download or read book Scorched Earth written by Emmanuel Kreike and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A global history of environmental warfare and the case for why it should be a crime The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.
Book Synopsis Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica by : Rani T. Alexander
Download or read book Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica written by Rani T. Alexander and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new account of human interaction and culture change for Mesoamerica that connects the present to the past. Social histories that assess the cultural upheavals between the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica and the ethnographic present overlook the archaeological record, with its unique capacity to link local practices to global processes. To fill this gap, the authors weigh the material manifestations of the colonial and postcolonial trajectory in light of local, regional, and global historical processes that have unfolded over the last five hundred years. Research on a suite of issues—economic history, production of commodities, agrarian change, resistance, religious shifts, and sociocultural identity—demonstrates that the often shocking patterns observed today are historically contingent and culturally mediated, and therefore explainable. This book belongs to a new wave of scholarship that renders the past immediately relevant to the present, which Alexander and Kepecs see as one of archaeology’s most crucial goals.
Download or read book Fueling Mexico written by Germán Vergara and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germán Vergara explains how, when, and why fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) became the basis of Mexican society.
Book Synopsis Islands in the Rainforest by : Stéphen Rostain
Download or read book Islands in the Rainforest written by Stéphen Rostain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stéphen Rostain’s book is a culmination of 25 years of research on the extensive human modification of the wetlands environment of Guiana and how it reshapes our thinking of ancient settlement in lowland South America and other tropical zones. Rostain demonstrates that populations were capable of developing intensive raised-field agriculture, which supported significant human density, and construct causeways, habitation mounds, canals, and reservoirs to meet their needs. The work is comparative in every sense, drawing on ethnology, ethnohistory, ecology, and geography; contrasting island Guiana with other wetland regions around the world; and examining millennia of pre-Columbian settlement and colonial occupation alike. Rostain’s work demands a radical rethinking of conventional wisdom about settlement in tropical lowlands and landscape management by its inhabitants over the course of millennia.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History by : Joel Mokyr
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History written by Joel Mokyr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 2812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the economic roots of modern industrialism? Were labor unions ever effective in raising workers' living standards? Did high levels of taxation in the past normally lead to economic decline? These and similar questions profoundly inform a wide range of intertwined social issues whose complexity, scope, and depth become fully evident in the Encyclopedia. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field, the Encyclopedia is divided not only by chronological and geographic boundaries, but also by related subfields such as agricultural history, demographic history, business history, and the histories of technology, migration, and transportation. The articles, all written and signed by international contributors, include scholars from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Covering economic history in all areas of the world and segments of ecnomies from prehistoric times to the present, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History is the ideal resource for students, economists, and general readers, offering a unique glimpse into this integral part of world history.
Download or read book Banana Cultures written by John Soluri and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States. Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.
Book Synopsis Understanding World Regional Geography by : Erin H. Fouberg
Download or read book Understanding World Regional Geography written by Erin H. Fouberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-12-27 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding World Regional Geography (UWRG) is a course designed to teach students to think and apply geographic concepts long after the course is over. Author Erin Fouberg draws from her expertise in geography education and research in student learning to create a product that has a strong pedagogical framework designed to engage students and deepen their understanding of the world by having them “DO” Geography. UWRG includes features that help students learn to read cultural and physical landscapes, ask geographic questions, apply geographic concepts, and make connections. It integrates 25 threshold concepts and teaches students how geographers apply these concepts and asks them to apply these concepts themselves. This enables them to grasp the complexities of the world and provides them with the knowledge and thinking skills necessary to understanding it. UWRG is the first introductory course to integrate ESRI ArcGIS Online thematic maps, enabling students to engage with course materials, see patterns, and answer geographic questions.
Book Synopsis The AOxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World by : Danna A. Levin Rojo
Download or read book The AOxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World written by Danna A. Levin Rojo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 923 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collaborative multi-authored volume integrates interdisciplinary approaches to ethnic, imperial, and national borderlands in the Iberian World (16th to early 19th centuries). It illustrates the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world. The book offers a balanced state-of-the-art educational tool representing innovative research for teaching and scholarship. Its geographical scope encompasses imperial borderlands in what today is northern Mexico and southern United States; the greater Caribbean basin, including cross-imperial borderlands among the island archipelagos and Central America; the greater Paraguayan river basin, including the Gran Chaco, lowland Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia; the Amazonian borderlands; the grasslands and steppes of southern Argentina and Chile; and Iberian trade and religious networks connecting the Americas to Africa and Asia. The volume is structured around the following broad themes: environmental change and humanly crafted landscapes; the role of indigenous allies in the Spanish and Portuguese military expeditions; negotiations of power across imperial lines and indigenous chiefdoms; the parallel development of subsistence and commercial economies across terrestrial and maritime trade routes; labor and the corridors of forced and free migration that led to changing social and ethnic identities; histories of science and cartography; Christian missions, music, and visual arts; gender and sexuality, emphasizing distinct roles and experiences documented for men and women in the borderlands. While centered in the colonial era, it is framed by pre-contact Mesoamerican borderlands and nineteenth-century national developments for those regions where the continuity of inter-ethnic relations and economic networks between the colonial and national periods is particularly salient, like the central Andes, lowland Bolivia, central Brazil, and the Mapuche/Pehuenche captaincies in South America. All the contributors are highly recognized scholars, representing different disciplines and academic traditions in North America, Latin America and Europe.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World by : Danna A. Levin Rojo
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World written by Danna A. Levin Rojo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 923 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collaborative multi-authored volume integrates interdisciplinary approaches to ethnic, imperial, and national borderlands in the Iberian World (16th to early 19th centuries). It illustrates the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world. The book offers a balanced state-of-the-art educational tool representing innovative research for teaching and scholarship. Its geographical scope encompasses imperial borderlands in what today is northern Mexico and southern United States; the greater Caribbean basin, including cross-imperial borderlands among the island archipelagos and Central America; the greater Paraguayan river basin, including the Gran Chaco, lowland Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia; the Amazonian borderlands; the grasslands and steppes of southern Argentina and Chile; and Iberian trade and religious networks connecting the Americas to Africa and Asia. The volume is structured around the following broad themes: environmental change and humanly crafted landscapes; the role of indigenous allies in the Spanish and Portuguese military expeditions; negotiations of power across imperial lines and indigenous chiefdoms; the parallel development of subsistence and commercial economies across terrestrial and maritime trade routes; labor and the corridors of forced and free migration that led to changing social and ethnic identities; histories of science and cartography; Christian missions, music, and visual arts; gender and sexuality, emphasizing distinct roles and experiences documented for men and women in the borderlands. While centered in the colonial era, it is framed by pre-contact Mesoamerican borderlands and nineteenth-century national developments for those regions where the continuity of inter-ethnic relations and economic networks between the colonial and national periods is particularly salient, like the central Andes, lowland Bolivia, central Brazil, and the Mapuche/Pehuenche captaincies in South America. All the contributors are highly recognized scholars, representing different disciplines and academic traditions in North America, Latin America and Europe.
Book Synopsis An Introduction to Cultural Ecology by : Mark Q. Sutton
Download or read book An Introduction to Cultural Ecology written by Mark Q. Sutton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This contemporary introduction to the principles and research base of cultural ecology is the ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses that deal with the intersection of humans and the environment in traditional societies. After introducing the basic principles of cultural anthropology, environmental studies, and human biological adaptations to the environment, the book provides a thorough discussion of the history of, and theoretical basis behind, cultural ecology. The bulk of the book outlines the broad economic strategies used by traditional cultures: hunting/gathering, horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture. Fully explicated with cases, illustrations, and charts on topics as diverse as salmon ceremonies among Northwest Indians, contemporary Maya agriculture, and the sacred groves in southern China, this book gives a global view of these strategies. An important emphasis in this text is on the nature of contemporary ecological issues, how peoples worldwide adapt to them, and what the Western world can learn from their experiences. A perfect text for courses in anthropology, environmental studies, and sociology.
Book Synopsis Plant Biology and Biotechnology by : Bir Bahadur
Download or read book Plant Biology and Biotechnology written by Bir Bahadur and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a much-needed compilation of essential reviews on diverse aspects of plant biology, written by eminent botanists. These reviews effectively cover a wide range of aspects of plant biology that have contemporary relevance. At the same time they integrate classical morphology with molecular biology, physiology with pattern formation, growth with genomics, development with morphogenesis, and classical crop-improvement techniques with modern breeding methodologies. Classical botany has been transformed into cutting-edge plant biology, thus providing the theoretical basis for plant biotechnology. It goes without saying that biotechnology has emerged as a powerful discipline of Biology in the last three decades. Biotechnological tools, techniques and information, used in combination with appropriate planning and execution, have already contributed significantly to economic growth and development. It is estimated that in the next decade or two, products and processes made possible by biotechnology will account for over 60% of worldwide commerce and output. There is, therefore, a need to arrive at a general understanding and common approach to issues related to the nature, possession, conservation and use of biodiversity, as it provides the raw material for biotechnology. More than 90% of the total requirements for the biotechnology industry are contributed by plants and microbes, in terms of goods and services. There are however substantial plant and microbial resources that are waiting for biotechnological exploitation in the near future through effective bioprospection. In order to exploit plants and microbes for their useful products and processes, we need to first understand their basic structure, organization, growth and development, cellular process and overall biology. We also need to identify and develop strategies to improve the productivity of plants. In view of the above, in this two-volume book on plant biology and biotechnology, the first volume is devoted to various aspects of plant biology and crop improvement. It includes 33 chapters contributed by 50 researchers, each of which is an expert in his/her own field of research. The book begins with an introductory chapter that gives a lucid account on the past, present and future of plant biology, thereby providing a perfect historical foundation for the chapters that follow. Four chapters are devoted to details on the structural and developmental aspects of the structures of plants and their principal organs. These chapters provide the molecular biological basis for the regulation of morphogenesis of the form of plants and their organs, involving control at the cellular and tissue levels. Details on biodiversity, the basic raw material for biotechnology, are discussed in a separate chapter, in which emphasis is placed on the genetic, species and ecosystem diversities and their conservation. Since fungi and other microbes form an important component of the overall biodiversity, special attention is paid to the treatment of fungi and other microbes in this volume. Four chapters respectively deal with an overview of fungi, arbuscularmycorrhizae and their relation to the sustenance of plant wealth, diversity and practical applications of mushrooms, and lichens (associated with a photobiont). Microbial endosymbionts associated with plants and phosphate solubilizing microbes in the rhizosphere of plants are exhaustively treated in two separate chapters. The reproductive strategies of bryophytes and an overview on Cycads form the subject matter of another two chapters, thus fulfilling the need to deal with the non-flowering Embryophyte group of plants. Angiosperms, the most important group of plants from a biotechnological perspective, are examined exhaustively in this volume. The chapters on angiosperms provide an overview and cover the genetic basis of flowers development, pre-and post-fertilization reproductive growth and development, seed biology and technology, plant secondary metabolism, photosynthesis, and plant volatile chemicals. A special effort has been made to include important topics on crop improvement in this volume. The importance of pollination services, apomixes, male sterility, induced mutations, polyploidy and climate changes is discussed, each in a separate chapter. Microalgalnutra-pharmaceuticals, vegetable-oil-based nutraceuticals and the importance of alien crop resources and underutilized crops for food and nutritional security form the topics of three other chapters in this volume. There is also a special chapter on the applications of remote sensing in the plant sciences, which also provides information on biodiversity distribution. The editors of this volume believe the wide range of basic topics on plant biology that have great relevance in biotechnology covered will be of great interest to students, researchers and teachers of botany and plant biotechnology alike.
Book Synopsis Russia's Unknown Agriculture by : Judith Pallot
Download or read book Russia's Unknown Agriculture written by Judith Pallot and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-08-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basing their findings on four years of research during which they studied rural districts drawn from a variety of contrasting regions of European Russia, the authors discuss the place of rural households in Russia's agri-food production system. They show that far from being solely concerned with 'survival' household plots in contemporary Russia are increasingly used to produce crops and livestock products for the market. In the book they describe the rich variety of forms that small and independent farming takes today from highly localised clusters of cucumber or tomato producers to specialization in crop or animal husbandry at a higher spatial scale or associated with particular ethnic groups. The authors systematically examine the influence on past and present practices of distance and the environment, the state of the large farm sector, local customs, and ethnicity on what households produce and how they produce it often using case studies of people they have met (plot holders, farmers, local officials) to illustrate their point. They criticise the tendency of the household production to be treated as the agricultural 'Other' in post-Soviet Russia and argue with the right incentives it has the potential for further development.
Book Synopsis Gender, Geography, and Punishment by : Judith Pallot
Download or read book Gender, Geography, and Punishment written by Judith Pallot and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first of its kind that brings together human geography and the sociology of punishment to explore the relationship between distance and the punishment in contemporary Russia. Using established penological and geographical theories, the book presents in-depth empirical research to show how the experiences of women prisoners are shaped by the distances that the Russian penal service sends prisoners to serve their sentences. Its most eye-catching feature is its use of interviews conducted by the authors and their research team with adult and juvenile women prisoners, ex-prisoners and prison officers in penal facilities in different regions of the Russian Federation between 2006 and 2010. It includes discussion of the impact of Russia's distinctive penal geography on prisoners' family relationships, how women prisoners' sense of place and gender identities are shaped and re-shaped on their journey from pre-trial facility to 'correction colony' to release, and the social hierarchies, relationships and practices that characterise Russia's penal institutions for women. The authors are both experienced researchers in Russia. The book brings together their complementary disciplinary expertise in the development of the concept of 'coerced mobilization' to explore Russia's punishment culture. The book argues that Russia's inherited geography of penality, combined with traditional ideas about women's role that shape the penal service's management of women prisoners, add to their 'pains of imprisonment'. Crucially, the authors show how these factors are constraining the Russian penal service's ability to implement successive reforms aimed at humanizing Russia's notoriously tough prisons. Russian imprisonment as it relates to women is, they believe, an area of significant concern for lawmakers in that country as well as to human rights campaigners, geographers interested in space and power, and scholars studying the post-Soviet system.
Book Synopsis Geopolitics and Empire by : Gerard Kearns
Download or read book Geopolitics and Empire written by Gerard Kearns and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-06-11 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the long entanglement between ideas of Geopolitics and the ideology and practices of Empire tracing these matters back to the true founder of Geopolitics, a British geographer of the early-twentieth century, Halford Mackinder.
Book Synopsis The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions by : Daniel Contreras
Download or read book The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions written by Daniel Contreras and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
