Dan Malkinson - Böcker

Hunting and Extinctions in Southwest Asia and North America: The Silent Testimony of Communal Game Traps explores communal game traps for harvesting ungulate herds in two continents, utilizing a comparative approach addressing settings, species, and the hunters’ societies. The kites of Southwest Asia have been known to archaeologists for almost one hundred years but with the advent of high‑resolution satellite images, thousands of sites have been found. Using the rich data from the Southwest and Central Asia and North America, this book addresses some of the important questions that arise concerning the social, economic and environmental implications of ancient and recent use of large game traps. This book has four major parts. The first introduces the book and reviews the evolution of human hunting. The second part presents examples of desert kites from various areas of Southwest and Central Asia. Detailed case studies are included that use a variety of evidence such as aerial surveys, field surveys, excavations, eye witnesses accounts, and petroglyph depictions. Environmental and geographical settings of the isolated traps, the clusters of traps, and the long chains are explored to provide conceptual models regarding past herd behavior and their seasonal migrations. The third part presents examples of communal game traps in various regions in North America, addressing the same issues discussed in the second part. The fourth part provides a comparative study of game traps in North America with the kites of Southwest Asia, focusing on the settings, species, and social organization of the hunters.With the research on communal game traps increasing rapidly, this book provides the first inclusive synthesis on the subject and is for archaeologists, anthropologists, zoologists, ecologists, and environmentalists who are interested in past interactions between humans and their environments, and the impact of past human communities on the landscape and on target game populations, as well as the consequences that are still relevant today.

As cities are rapidly expanding and encroaching into agricultural and natural areas, a question of primary concern is how this expansion affects surrounding agriculture and natural landscapes. This book presents a wide spectrum of both theoretical and empirical approaches to simulation and assessment of landscape dynamics. The first part presents state-of-the-art modelling approaches pertaining to land-use changes entailed by the urban sprawl, at different spatial resolutions and temporal time scales. The second part is dedicated to case studies of the effects and consequences of the emerging urban-agriculture open space patterns.