Felix Riede - Böcker

The first volume presents new archaeological and ecological data and analyses on the relation between human subsistence and survival, and the natural history of North-Western Europe throughout the period 10000 - 6000 BC. The volume contains contributions from ecological oriented archaeologists and from the natural sciences, throwing new light on the physical and biotic/ecological conditions of relevance to the earliest settlement. Main themes are human subsistence, subsistence technology, ecology and food availability pertaining to the first humans, and demographic patterns among humans linked to the accessibility of different landscapes.

Catastrophes are on the rise due to climate change, as is their toll in terms of lives and livelihoods as world populations rise and people settle into hazardous places. While disaster response and management are traditionally seen as the domain of the natural and technical sciences, awareness of the importance and role of cultural adaptation is essential. This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptations to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impact, and facilitate recoveries.

Catastrophes are on the rise due to climate change, as is their toll in terms of lives and livelihoods as world populations rise and people settle into hazardous places. While disaster response and management are traditionally seen as the domain of the natural and technical sciences, awareness of the importance and role of cultural adaptation is essential. This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptations to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impact, and facilitate recoveries.

The year is 12,800 BP. Europe is entirely occupied by people of the so-called Upper Magdalenian culture. Well, not entirely ... one small region, southern Scandinavia, differs markedly from its neighbours. These lines open the first book-length treatment of the cultural evolution of late ice age forager societies at the northern edge of Europe. Splendid Isolation summarises more than ten years of research that connects the cataclysmic eruption of the Laacher See volcano in present-day western Germany with contemporary cultural changes. It also offers an in-depth treatment of the eruption's impact on plants, animals and people as well as its cultural-historical consequences. Invoking the term 'splendid isolation', the author argues that despite the eruption's evidently detrimental ecological impacts, it led to a regional cultural effervescence in the form of the Bromme culture. By charting this past calamity, the book also shows how the study of ancient disasters can be made useful in today's debates of resilience, vulnerability and apocalypse.

Volcanic eruptions can affect everything - nature, wildlife, people. From the earliest times, human resilience has been tested by this most severe environmental hazard resulting in a variety of collective responses - from despair and helplessness to endurance, increased worship of the gods, and even mass migrations. Past vulnerability breaks new ground by examining the histories of extreme environmental events, from the resent eruptions of Mount Merapi in Central Java to the prehistoric Toba supervolcanic eruption 74.000 years ago on the island of Sumatra. Experts from a broad and unconventional range of disciplines - from anthropology to literature studies and from archaeology to theology - discuss the impacts of volcanic eruptions in human history and prehistory. The book sets the scene for a 'palaeosocial volcanology' that complements and extends current approaches to volcanic hazards in the natural and social sciences by presenting historically informed and evidence-based analyses on how traditional societies dealt with these dangers -- or failed to do so.

Typology is a core method and practice in archaeology. As a particular form of classification first developed during the infancy of the discipline itself, typology has remained an archaeological staple despite countless twists and turns. Rarely taught explicitly, and often critiqued, typology refuses to loosen its grip on archaeological practice. In 14 chapters, this book explores how typology as a method and typologies as specific practices have developed, how typology is situated in contemporary theoretical thinking, and how typologies relate to the rapidly unfolding computational revolution that is reshaping the discipline. The volume offers state-of-the-art perspectives on typology grounded in all periods and across numerous artefact classes – ceramics, lithics, coins – as well as experimental articulations between typological thinking and mapping practices. Together, the chapters making up this volume challenge naïve typologizing and bring the topic of what we call things and how we classify them to the fore of archaeological debates. The volume is essential reading for graduate students and professionals alike; it offers critical perspectives on core principles of archaeological classification but also provides visionary signposts for how theory and computational methods engage with classification practices now and in the years to come. Notably, this book is not only experimental in its content but also in its form: All chapters contained in it have been peer-assessed in their preprint forms such that earlier versions, all peer reviews and editorial recommendations are available as rich metadata. In this way, the volume sets new standards for bibliodiverse scholarly publishing at the interface between the digital and the physical.