Settlement and Landscape Transformations in the Amuq Valley, Hatay

Ancient Indian treatises on religious piety—dharmasūtra and dharmaśāstra—shame alcoholic drinks and drinking. Although there were many weak alcoholic beverages like beer, there is still a quarrel of distillation. Robert Marshall, Frank Raymond Allchin and Marianne Oort believe there was a distillation in the Vedic and later times, i.e. in the first millennium BCE. James McHugh and Irfan Habib connect distillation with the early second millennium CE. My paper treats perceptions of alcoholic drinks and drinking in Ancient India during early centuries CE, as evidenced by the Sanskrit classical treatises. The Laws of Manu, or Manusmṛti, blames drinking (pāna, mada, madyapa) and drinks (surā, madya) but admits their daily presence and naturalness for humankind. The Manusmṛti and Arthaśāstra give an evidence against distillation in the first centuries CE. The Arthaśāstra recommends and regulates liquor trade and the quality of various liquors, including surā made from grain, and grape wine, or madhu. The recipes described in the Arthaśāstra imply the wide use of spices, molasses, fruits and flowers of various plants in making various alcoholic drinks, including maireya and āsava. In the Kāmasūtra, surā, maireya, āsava, and grape wine are attributes of conversation with courtesans and of a household. According to the Kāmasūtra, a good woman has to make surā and āsava. The medical treatise of Ancient India Suśrutasaṃhitā recommends a moderate consumption of intoxicating drinks. Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacaritam—Acts of the Buddha—and Kālidāsa’s play Shakuntala are evidence of everyday drinking in Ancient India of the early first millennium CE.

The catchment basin of the Sarandopotamos on Evia Island (Greece) has been an environment of habitation and worship since the early Neolithic. Many settlements from different periods have been found in this area. It is also in this catchment, close to the Sarandopotamos delta, that the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece discovered in 2007, the sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia after centuries of investigation. This discovery aside, we still do not understand if, and the extent to which, the human history of occupation and abandonment in this region is related to its environmental history. Thus, the aim of this research is to use a suite of paleoenvironmental reconstruction methods to recreate ancient landscapes, their environments and their evolution to understand the society-environment relation. The sanctuary and its eventual abandonment could potentially be impacted by synergistic reactions between changes in sediment supply, changes in basin hydrology and sea-level all of which may have impacted both the magnitude and frequency of local flooding via changes in river bed level, lateral shifting of the river and water table rises and falls. Thus, the aim of this project is to undertake an integrated, multi-method reconstruction of the local water-sediment environment and to relate this to the history of the sanctuary and wider human settlement. This will then test whether an environmental influence needs to be retained as a hypothesis for wider societal changes in this area. In order to do this, a model of the sedimentary dynamics of the catchment is being carried out using LAPSUS software, and sedimentary cores are being obtained in order to understand the relationship between environmental and human-driven (e.g. land use) change in the catchment, the geomorphic response of the delta and the history of human occupation. The relationship between the delta and eustatic and isostatic history also has to be understood. A single beam eco sounder survey is been conducted in order to investigate the different delta created by the shift in the Sarandopotamos bed. Moreover, in order to better understand the local context and the landscapes observed today, this project is also interested in the geomorphological history of periods prior to human occupation. These different aspects emphasize the complexity of the project but through developing a multi-disciplinary and multi-scale appraisal of environmental history and how it links to human history we may get a better understanding of the extent to which the two are connected. This poster will present preliminary modelling results that demonstrate the sensitivity of the land-ocean interaction to sea-level rise and delta dynamics from the late Pleistocene through the Holocene to the present.

The Madonie Mountains, located in the northwestern part of Sicily, a central mountainous chain in the Mediterranean basin, offer an excellent case study to the investigation of the relationship among human peopling, environment, and consequent transformation of landscape over the millennia. The earliest direct evidence for the exploitation of the mountainous territories of Sicily is dated to 9450±50 BP (9120–8565 cal BCE). After a gap, the Neolithic communities that were the first to push inland and into mountainous territories were involved in economic practices that mainly included the breeding of sheep and goats. At the Vallone Inferno rock-shelter a long and complete sequence of more than 1,000 years, beginning at the end of the third millennium BCE, shows the development of pastoral activities carried out on the mountain territories by human communities coming from the central and southern part of the island. The historical occupation of the Madonie was largely influenced by the Greek colony of Himera and the subsequent Roman settlement. The exploitation of medium- and high-altitude areas (above 700 m asl) is linked to activities related to pastoralism, in connection/combination with rural settlements in the plains. Specialized activities carried out on the mountains, such as breeding of pigs, have been recognized during the seventh and ninth centuries CE.

Chapter 1 - A Brief History of Alloys and the Birth of High-Entropy Alloys

Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept’s major global contentions. As a result, the Axial Age concept remains controversial. Seshat: Global History Databank provides new tools for examining this topic in social formations across Afro-Eurasia during the first two millennia BCE and first millennium CE, allowing scholars to empirically evaluate the varied and contrasting claims researchers have put forward. Results undercut the notion of a specific “age” of axiality limited to a specific geo-temporal localization. Critical traits offered as evidence of an axial transformation by proponents of the Axial Age concept appeared across Afro-Eurasia hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years prior to the proposed Axial Age. Our analysis raises important questions for future evaluations of this period and points the way toward empirically-led, historical-sociological investigations of the ideological and institutional foundations of complex societies.

Hailed as "one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change. The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls "my own intellectual turning to the land." History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature--though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation--a form of "environmental imperialism." He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected--and continue to affect--human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms. "Nostalgia runs all through this society," Worster writes, "fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation." These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history--and the beauty of nature lost or endangered--underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

This article postulates a method of determining the date of human settlement in the Canary Islands by establishing when species of mice, which are commensal with human beings and hence in all likelihood migrated with them, arrived in the archipelago. At the same time, the extinction of several species of endemic rodents may also correlate with such arrivals. The study establishes the outer limits for the arrival of the mouse species, between the 5th millennium BCE and the 15th century CE, but, while indicative archaeological evidence indicates human settlement was established by around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, the absence of conclusive dating of fossil mice remains leaves a definitive conclusion for the start of such settlement still open.

ObjectivesMalignant mesothelioma (MM) is a rare and generally fatal cancer, usually caused by asbestos, although about 5%–10% of cases report no asbestos exposure. This study aimed to identify sources whereby...

Through their natural, aesthetic and cultural attributes, landscapes serve a range of human needs. The perception and value placed on these attributes and services confer desirability on a given landscape. Landscape desirability refers to the extent of acceptability or preferability of the perceived state and functioning of a given landscape in relation to serving the landscape needs of its human inhabitants. This paper presents the idea of, and an approach for quantifying landscape desirability using four communities in Cape Coast, Ghana. A landscape desirability index was derived from four factors (attractivity, wellbeing, dignity, and eco-resilience) based on scores assigned by respondents to three sub-components of each of the four factors. The results show that all the communities scored their landscapes moderately on attractivity, wellbeing, dignity, and eco-resilience, as well as overall landscape desirability. Bare surfaces and contribution to flood and erosion mitigation were a major consideration in respondents’ scores of the sub-components of the factors. Nature and beauty (sub-components of attractivity) and sub-components of eco-resilience contributed considerably to the low desirability indices for the communities. This suggests the need to focus on these components in efforts to enhance landscape desirability. The findings suggest a need for wider studies to capture residents’ perceptions of their landscapes as an input into participatory landscape planning, transformation and management in Ghana. The quantitative approach applied can easily be adapted and replicated across communities and spatial scales to provide a comparable basis for sustainable landscape transformation in human settlements.

Reviewed by: Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance Jeannette Vaught Rodeo: An Animal History. By Susan Nance. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 320. Illustrations, notes, works cited, index.) Rodeo as a sport and longstanding constellation of American cultural iconographies is receiving a serious scholarly reappraisal. Just last year, Rebecca Scofield's Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2019) re-evaluated various human histories and impacts of rodeo by carefully analyzing its fringes and margins. Now, historian Susan Nance presents a fresh accounting of rodeo from its very center. Her focus, on the overlooked and under-analyzed equines and bovines without whom there would be no rodeo, makes this book, Rodeo: An Animal History, true to its title. Following a formula that she employed in her history of elephant exhibitions, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Nance here provides a thorough business history of rodeo—infused with environmental history and insights from animal welfare science—to reconstruct the histories and experiences of animals involved in rodeo. She ranges from rodeo spectacles themselves to a mosaic of the ranches, feedlots, and slaughterhouses of the beef industry; rodeo schools; breeding farms; and thousands of rural backyards across the United States and Canada, without which rodeo could not happen. Nance's broad central argument is that rodeo is a resiliently effective mediator of the entwined social and environmental changes that accompanied western American settler colonialism and the often dire consequences of those changes on people, land, and animals. "Rodeo's animals," she argues, "become surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence of its history" (6). By paying attention to the environmental and animal histories of rodeo, Nance shows that "rodeo has been both a stubborn celebration of that rural quarrel with the land and a coping mechanism for dealing with the limits of people, animals, and the land" (15). Throughout, Nance foregrounds the oppositional mentality embedded in western settler histories and how it plays out in rodeo culture. Her analysis spans the long century from early cowboy tournaments of the 1880s to the formation and success of the Professional Bull Riders tour in the 1990s and 2000s. In six chronological chapters, Nance relies on a formidable collection of archives, including myriad organizational [End Page 360] records and periodicals. She also provides a thorough bibliography of source material pertaining to rodeo, animals, and their diverse allied subjects. Each chapter focuses on a particular equine or bovine rodeo participant, whose stories reveal the back stage, as it were, to readers. Nance pairs readings of human historical records with on-the-hoof accounts of what animals experienced, and her account is straightforward about the brutality that animals and humans experience. The difference, she asserts, is that humans involved in rodeo and rodeo-adjacent pipelines choose to put themselves in the difficult and dangerous positions that construct the complex web of considering oneself "western" or rural. Animals do not. Nance grounds her analysis of human-animal rodeo relationships in the concept of the "myth of animal consent," a phrase she borrows and expands upon from the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. As Nance shows, this concept frequently manifests as an acknowledgement of animal intelligence and consciousness, characteristics that animal welfare and rights advocates have long considered a reason to care for animals. However, in rodeo and its allied conduits, it also serves as proof that nonhuman animals are making informed and free choices about their actions. This absurd logic, Nance explains, appears in totemic rodeo clichés like animals who "love to buck" and in pervasive narratives about animals that are glad to perform in rodeos because they know the alternative is the slaughterhouse. This twisting of animal intelligence into a myth about their consent accompanies Nance's analysis of many layers of rodeo performance, from race and masculinity to environmental degradation and economic pressures to which rodeo responds and adapts. Even for those who are used to thinking of rodeo as a problematic space for human and other animals, a sobering thought surfaces: improving the lives of all species in rodeo performances...

Neolithic land-use, landscape development, and environmental dynamics in the Carpathian Basin

Human occupation and geomorphological evolution of the Thessaloniki Plain (Greece) since mid Holocene

Reviewed by: Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa ed. by Gareth Austin, and: The Birth of the Anthropocene by Jeremy Davies, and: After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene by Jedediah Purdy Robynne Mellor Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa. Edited by gareth austin. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 344 pp. £76.50 (hardcover). The Birth of the Anthropocene. By jeremy davies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. 248 pp. $29.95 (hardcover). After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. By jedediah purdy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 336 pp. $29.95 (hardcover). The Anthropocene is a concept with as many definitions as the authors who write about it. In the three books examined below, the complexity of what the Anthropocene is, what it means, and how to contextualize it is very pronounced. The timescales differ from millions to hundred to tens of years in the past, and then all push through into the future. They variously look at countries, regions, continents, and the entire planet. The authors incorporate many fields other than history to contemplate the Anthropocene, from philosophy of law to stratigraphy and archeology. Despite all of these differing approaches, disparate definitions, and diverse methods of studying the Anthropocene, there is a similar conclusion that each book reaches about what it means for humans and nature in the years to come. Jeremy Davies' The Birth of the Anthropocene, is a sweeping and ambitious positioning of our current place in the Earth's long history. He argues that it is necessary to understand the Anthropocene as not only a new geological epoch, but also the end of the last one. The Anthropocene is a transition not just a beginning, and a period that [End Page 441] bridges the present and the deep past. Thus, his goal is to contextualize the Anthropocene on a geological timescale; it is both the Anthropocene and the "end-Holocene event." In chapter 5, "An Obituary for the Holocene," he chillingly remarks, "human civilization has existed only in the Holocene so far" (p. 145). Davies deftly digests deep time and makes it manageable for the reader. He begins by noting the shortfalls in how the media have previously portrayed long stretches of time then delves into the changing ways earth scientists conceptualize the planet's changes from the primordial to the present. He particularly notes the shift among earth scientists from an understanding of the Earth as gradually advancing to its current state to a framework of "neo-catastrophism." Throughout the book, Davies' invokes this concept which holds that, over the history of the planet, "There was no stately, teleological progress towards the arrival of humans. Instead the story has been full of sharp twists and transformations" (p. 9). In his reading, the Anthropocene is not a uniquely anthropocentric occurrence, but rather a continuation of a long pattern of violent fits, starts, and existential luck. He effectively uses this concept in a chapter on the history of the past 640 million years, then zooms in again, to focus on the past 11,700 years, the Holocene. Jedediah Purdy's After Nature looks at history within a shorter and smaller frame. His book is an exploration of the history of environmental imagination, how it becomes enshrined in law, and how those laws then shape landscapes. Focusing on the United States and beginning in the seventeenth century, Purdy separates environmental imagination into four chronological phases: providential, Romantic, utilitarian, and ecological. Though this historical examination takes up the bulk of the book, the ultimate aim is to prescribe a new environmental vision for the Anthropocene, one that draws on the lessons of the previous four visions. The conclusions he reaches are that humans are most able to enact environmental change through law when the environmental vision on which these laws rest is one that contains both fear and love. In his conclusion, Purdy adeptly disassembles some options posited to cope with the consequences of the Anthropocene. He first picks apart ideas put forth to ameliorate or assuage the consequences of the Anthropocene with technology, and then does the same with suggestions of how to cope with...

Occupational Asthma: Review of Assessment, Treatment, and Compensation

Lead white is one of the most important pigments in human history, and its synthesis has promoted the development of art and cosmetics. The corrosion approach to synthesize lead white appeared in Greece during the fourth century BCE, and since then lead white has been produced on a large-scale and widely used in painting and cosmetics across Europe. However, when and how synthetic lead white appeared in east Eurasia and whether it was also involved with beauty remained unclear. Here, we investigate some white cosmetic residues from the Liangdaicun site during the eighth century BCE in northern China through FTIR, XRD, SEM-EDS, radioactive and stable carbon isotope analyses. The results show that these residues were the earliest synthesized lead white in the world to date, which was produced by the precipitation method in solution distinct from the corrosion method practiced in ancient Greece. Thus, the synthesis of lead white should have evolved independently in east and west Eurasia during the first millennium BCE. The mass production of synthetic lead white with lower cost promoted the widespread use of white makeup in China and the Mediterranean World, which triggered a cosmetic revolution and highlighted that the pursuit of beauty stimulated the development of chemistry in human history, especially the earliest wet chemistry practice in China.