Many dryland regions contain archaeological remains which suggest that there must have been intensive phases of settlement in what now seem to be dry and degraded environments. Scholars have often speculated about what must have happened to turn past glories into present day barrenness,
opinions generally dividing between climatic change and human activity as the primary culprit. Perhaps climate shifted to greater aridity, perhaps catastrophic but short-term droughts became too frequent? Or was it that people sowed the seeds of their own destruction, for example by removing trees or developing irrigation systems that promoted salinization,
stripping the landscape for fuelwood, or by allowing their livestock to overgraze? The debate has been characterized more by assertion than by knowledge. Contemporary ecological theory suggests that relationships between dryland environments, climate, and people are not simple: drylands can be remarkably resilient both in terms of their environment and the subsistence and farming systems that were once abundant. The
archaeological, anthropological and palaeoenvironmental studies in The Archaeology of Drylands bring deep time perspecti to these debates. This approach is used to examine how different kinds of societies of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe, whether near or remote in time, used their different drylands. It explores the risks and opportunities they confronted, identifies the solutions they reached and the reasons
for them, and examines the short- and long-term consequences of those solutions. Through developing a more sophisticated perspective based upon archaeological knowledge, the chapters in this book discuss successes and failures of past land
use and settlement in drylands, and contribute to wider modern debates about desertification and the sustainability of dryland settlement.
By:
Graeme Barker,
David Gilbertson
Edited by:
Graeme Barker,
D.D. Gilbertson
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 26mm
Weight: 900g
ISBN: 9780415230018
ISBN 10: 0415230012
Series: One World Archaeology
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 02 November 2000
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Primary
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Part I Introduction 1 Living at the margin: themes in the archaeology of drylands 2 The dynamic climatology of drylands Part II Southwest and Central Asia 3 The decline of desert agriculture: a view from the classical period Negev 4 Farmers, herders and miners in the Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan: a 10,000-year landscape archaeology 5 Differing strategies for water supply and farming in the Syrian Black Desert 6 Irrigation agriculture in Central Asia: a long-term perspective from Turkmenistan Part III Sahara and Sahel 7 Conquests and land degradation in the eastern Maghreb during classical antiquity and the Middle Ages 8 Success, longevity, and failure of arid-land agriculture: Romano-Libyan floodwater farming in the Tripolitanian pre-desert 9 Twelve thousand years of human adaptation in Fezzan (Libyan Sahara)10 Farming and famine: subsistence strategies in Highland Ethiopia Part IV Eastern and southern Africa 11 Engaruka: farming by irrigation in Maasailand, c.AD 1400–1700 12 The agricultural landscape of the Nyanga area of Zimbabwe 13 Fifteenth-century agropastoral responses to a disequilibrial ecosystem in southeastern Botswana 14 Islands of intensive agriculture in African drylands: towards an explanatory framework Part V North and Central America 15 Prehistoric agriculture and anthropogenic ecology of the North American Southwest 16 The role of maguey in the Mesoamerican tierra fría: ethnographic, historic and archaeological perspectives Part VI Europe 17 Traditional irrigation systems in dryland Switzerland 18 Desertification, land degradation and land abandonment in the Rhône valley, France
Graeme Barker, David Gilbertson
Reviews for The Archaeology of Drylands: Living at the Margin
This book serves as much-needed exemplar of the state of research in drylands archaeology. It is must reading for researchers addressing the complex human ecological dynamic in semi-arid to arid environments. -Journal of Anthropological Research The Arachaelogy of the Drylands does present a number of important contributions that specialists, generalists, and graduate students will find useful, and the combination of classical and prehistoric studies is refreshing. -Center for Archaelogical Studies & Department of Anthropology
