scholarly journals Archaeological evidence for agrarian manuring: Studying the time-space dynamics of agricultural areas with surface-collected off-site material

Author(s):  
Nicolas Poirier
Author(s):  
Dimitra Stougiannidou ◽  
Eleni Zafeiriou ◽  
Yannis Raftoyannis

Forest fires have increased in the last decades, due to many factors such as climate change, land use change and management. In Greece, wildfires burn cultivated lands and affect significantly the rural economy and society. However, the economic impacts of forest fires on agricultural areas has not been estimated, and this is our aim. After an extended literature review and consultation with the stakeholders, we decided to build a model with many variables. The total cost of fire depends on the cost of prevention and suppression measures, and also direct and indirect costs. Direct costs, as adjusted for the immediate effects of fire, are divided into two categories: direct damages instantaneous and direct losses induced. Direct damages are estimated by a function that calculates the instantaneous damage in permanent crops, seasonal crops, livestock, infrastructure, construction and machinery. Direct losses are estimated by a function that calculates fire-induced costs in permanent crops, seasonal crops, livestock, additional borrowing costs and services costs. For the composition of the time-space model, we will use secondary data, as well as data originated from fieldwork. The literature review showed that the ex post analysis involving detailed consultation with a representative sample of affected farms, provides a more consistent appraisal.


2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingwei Zhang ◽  
Jinlong Fan ◽  
Hui Deng ◽  
Yanling Qiu

1998 ◽  
Vol 107 (6) ◽  
pp. 281-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomobumi Mishina ◽  
Yoshiki Iwazaki ◽  
Yasuaki Masumoto ◽  
Masaaki Nakayama
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (17) ◽  
pp. 8239-8248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Bar-Oz ◽  
Lior Weissbrod ◽  
Tali Erickson-Gini ◽  
Yotam Tepper ◽  
Dan Malkinson ◽  
...  

The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth–seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time–space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire.


Author(s):  
Gary M. Feinman ◽  
Linda M. Nicholas

Exuberant Spanish accounts of the 16th century Aztec market system have been part of the documentary record for hundreds of years. Yet the significance of markets and marketplace exchanges in the prehispanic Mesoamerican world has consistently been under-theorized until relatively recently. One of the key, but not sole, factors that has forced a shift in our analytical framing is the archaeological evidence that almost all production (craft and agrarian) was situated domestically in prehispanic Mesoamerica, yet many households were producing at least in part for exchange. In consequence, centralized managerial control over production would have been difficult if not impossible to sustain. Although such findings have cast great doubt on long-held visions of Mesoamerican command economies, understanding how power was funded in different prehispanic time/space contexts remains a central issue with a greater analytical focus now shifted to the fiscal foundations of collective action, governance, and power. Despite important shifts in the specific lessons and legacies that we draw from Marx’s historical analysis, intellectual parallels and debts to this materialist frame of thought remain, and these help generate new questions to guide the way forward for studying this region’s past.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 409-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Paola ◽  
Vamsi Ganti ◽  
David Mohrig ◽  
Anthony C. Runkel ◽  
Kyle M. Straub

Sadler's (1981) analysis of how measured sedimentation rate decreases with timescale of measurement quantified the vanishingly small fractional time preservation—completeness—of the stratigraphic record. Generalized numerical models have shown that the Sadler effect can be recovered, through the action of erosional clipping and time removal (the “stratigraphic filter”), from even fairly simple topographic sequences. However, several lines of evidence suggest that most of the missing time has not been eroded out but rather represents periods of inactivity or stasis. Low temporal completeness could also imply that the stratigraphic record is dominated by rare, extreme events, but paleotransport estimates suggest that this is not generally the case: The stratigraphic record is strangely ordinary. It appears that the organization of the topography into a hierarchy of forms also organizes the deposition into concentrated events that tend to preserve relatively ordinary conditions, albeit for very short intervals. Our understanding of time preservation would benefit from insight about how inactivity is recorded in strata; better ways to constrain localized, short-term rates of deposition; and a new focus on integrated time–space dynamics of deposition and preservation.


Oecologia ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wulf Greve ◽  
Frank Reiners

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liyong Ren ◽  
Liren Liu ◽  
De'an Liu ◽  
Juan Zhang

Author(s):  
Alex Mullen

This chapter begins by considering the motivations for undertaking sociolinguistic studies and discusses the range and quality of evidence that can be marshalled for early Britain. The pre-Roman linguistic situation and the advent and spread of Latin are assessed using linguistic and archaeological evidence, and the extent and nature of Latin–Celtic bilingualism across time, space, and social levels explored. A presentation of the long-standing debate on the nature of Latin spoken in Roman Britain follows, and new evidence is offered to counter the traditional view that British Latin was particularly conservative. The chapter closes by looking at the legacy of the linguistic impact of Roman Britain, briefly considering the post-Roman inscriptions and language contact phenomena in the Germanic languages.


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