Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This collection of papers, taken from the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Nashville in 1997, examines and interprets the evidence for and interactions between environmental disaster and human change in the archaeological record. Case studies range from prehistoric Greece, south Asia and Central Eurasia to El Nino in south coastal Peru in 1400 AD. The contributions demonstrate that the human response to environmental disaster is not predetermined and is the result of cultural, economic, ideological and political factors.
Synopsis
This cross-cultural study of the response by human groups to major environmental disruption brings together archaeological experts on Mediterranean Europe, Asia, Eurasia, Peru, Mexico, and the U.S. desert Southwest. Using the school of geographical analysis known as Hazard Research to identify the key attributes of natural disasters and the human social systems that respond to them, researchers consider environmental variables such as the magnitude, speed, and extent of the disaster as well as social variables such as population density, wealth distribution, and political complexity to analyze and assess the damage potential of various types of natural disasters. Such analyses can be useful in generating hypotheses about human response to disaster and in evaluating catastrophic models of sociopolitical collapse.
The research in this book tends to show that social collapse is an unusual outcome of environmental disaster. The authors hope to identify general patterns of human response to such disasters, and the chapters cover major themes such as timing and human agency.
About the Author
Garth Bawden is an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico and the director of the University's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. Richard Martin Reycraft is the director of preservation for the New Mexico State Monuments. His specialties include Andean archaeology and ruins stabilization. He also edited Us and Them: Archaeology and Ethnicity in the Andes.