Advances in Historical Ecology

Contents: Foreword/Carole L. Crumley. Preface. Introduction/William Balee. I. Human and material factors in historical ecology: 1. Historical ecology: premises and postulates/William Balee. 2. Ecological history and historical ecology: diachronic modeling versus historical explanation/Neil L. Whitehead. 3. A historical-ecological perspective on epidemic disease/Linda A. Newson. 4. Forged in fire: history, land, and anthropogenic fire/Stephen J. Pyne. 5. Diachronic ecotones and anthropogenic landscapes in Amazonia: contesting the consciousness of conservation/Darrell A. Posey. 6. Metaphor and metamorphism: some thoughts on environmental metahistory/Elizabeth Graham. II. Regional research landscape analyses in historical ecology: 7. The rat that Ate Louisiana: aspects of historical ecology in the Mississippi river Delta/Tristram R. Kidder. 8. Cultural, human and historical ecology in the Great Basin: fifty years of ideas about ten thousand years of prehistory/Robert L. Bettinger. 9. Ancient and modern hunter-Gatherers of Lowland South America: an evolutionary problem/Anna C. Rossevelt. 10. Potential versus actual vegetation: human behavior in a landscape medium/Ted Gragson. 11. Domestication as a historical and symbolic process: wild gardens and cultivated forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon/Laura Rival. 12. Independent yet interdependent "Isode": the historical ecology of traditional Piaroa settlement pattern/Stanford Zent. 13. Whatever happened to the stone age? steel tools and Yanomami historical ecology/R. Brian Ferguson. 14. Missionary activity and Indian Labour in the Upper Rio Negro of Brazil, 1680-1980: a historical-ecological approach/Janet M. Chernela. 15. Cultural persistence and environmental change: the Otomi of the valle del Mezquital, Mexico/Elinor G.K. Melville. 16. The great cow explosion in Rajasthan/Carol Henderson. 17. The historical ecology of Thailand: increasing thresholds of human environmental impact from prehistory to the present/Leslie E. Sponsel. Epilogue. Notes on the contributors. Index.

"The study of ecology is an attempt to understand the reciprocal relationships between the living and nonliving elements of the earth. For years, however, the discipline has either neglected the human element entirely or presumed that its effect on natural ecosystems is invariably negative. However, social scientists in geography an anthropology have criticized efforts to address this human-environment interaction as deterministic and mechanistic.

Bridging the divide between social and natural sciences, the contributors to this book use a more holistic perspective to explore the relationships between humans and their environment. Exploring short - and long-term local and global change, eighteen specialists in anthropology, geography, history, ethnobiology, and related disciplines present new perspectives on historical ecology.

The authors present a broad theoretical background of the material factors central to the field, such as anthropogenic fire, soils, and pathogens. This knowledge, applied to a series of regions, is used to investigate landscape transformations over time in South America, the Mississippi Delta, the Great Basin, Thailand and India. The contributors focus on traditional societies where lands are most at risk from the incursions of complex, state-level societies.

The book lays the groundwork for a more meaningful understanding of humankind's interaction with its biosphere. Scholars and environmental policymakers alike will appreciate this new critical vocabulary for biocultural phenomena."