Suchergebnisse

The end of the world as we know it -- How archaeologists think -- Sticks and stones : the beginning of technology -- Beads and stories : the beginning of culture -- Bread and beer : the beginning of agriculture -- Kings and chains : the beginning of the state -- Nothing lasts forever : the fifth beginning

In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity, and downplays attempts to model the original foraging lifeway or to use foragers to depict human nature stripped to its core. Kelly reviews the anthropological literature for variation among living foragers in terms of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, technology, exchange, male-female relations, division of labor, marriage, descent and political organization. Using the paradigm of human behavioral ecology, he analyzes the diversity in these areas and seeks to explain rather than explain away variability, and argues for an approach to prehistory that uses archaeological data to test theory rather than one that uses ethnographic analogy to reconstruct the past

Ethnoarchaeology is a field of study that aims to provide the information needed to draw reliable behavioral inferences from archaeological data. In this study, data from four settlement types (permanent villages, forest hamlets, seasonal hamlets, and foraging camps) of a forager–farmer population in southwestern Madagascar are examined from an archaeological perspective. Doing so shows that house size, house post diameter variability, outdoor workspace, trash disposal, and feature diversity jointly sort out settlements of different lengths of occupation. However, the relationship between mobility and material culture is not simply a product of the length of stay; it is also affected by differences in the social environments of settlements of different occupational lengths. Using the behavioral ecology of food sharing, we show that certain architectural changes that ensure privacy are expected to occur as settlements become larger and more permanent. These observations from Madagascar should be applicable to other areas.

Neuanfänge gehören zur Menschheit, das stellt Kelly klar, wenn er humorvoll und fundiert den Blick auf die aktuellen Umbrüche und auf vergangene in Kultur, Staatenwesen, Landwirtschaft, Technologie richtet. Rezension: Dieses Hardcover ist nicht, wie man zunächst vermuten könnte, eine Kulturgeschichte der Weltuntergangsmythen und -theorien. Sein Autor ist Professor für Anthropologie und weitgereister Archäologe, und er legt hier eine teils humorvolle Menschheitsgeschichte vor, in der er in den Mittelpunkt rückt, dass Neuanfänge für den Homo sapiens normal sind. Kelly setzt aktiv auf Hoffnung, wenn er der Menschheit den Spiegel vorhält. Er führt in Kapiteln u.a. die Themenbereiche Technologie, Kultur, Landwirtschaft und Staaten heran und kommentiert den Umbruch, vor dem die Menschheit aktuell steht. Er findet immer wieder Bezüge zur Populärkultur. - Das Buch ist im Original bereits aus dem Jahr 2016, es erhielt aber einen Epilog mit brandaktuellem Bezug (COVID-19). Ein Register und ein paar Grafiken runden den Band ab ("Wo und wann die wichtigsten Kulturpflanzen der Welt auftauchten"). Originell: Ein Daumenkino ziert die Seiten. Das Cover ist eher naiv gestaltet. (2)

We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the Holocene and statistically quantify coincident changes in the consumption of energy over space and time—an ecological phenomenon known as synchrony. When populations synchronize, adverse changes in ecosystems and social systems may cascade from society to society. Thus, to develop policies that favor the sustained use of resources, we must understand the processes that cause the synchrony of human populations. To date, it is not clear whether human societies display long-term synchrony or, if they do, the potential causes. Our analysis begins to fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the long-term synchrony of human societies, and we hypothesize that the synchrony of human populations results from (i) the creation of social ties that couple populations over smaller scales and (ii) much larger scale, globally convergent trajectories of cultural evolution toward more energy-consuming political economies with higher carrying capacities. Our results suggest that the process of globalization is a natural consequence of evolutionary trajectories that increase the carrying capacities of human societies.