Paul Halstead – författare

Bad Year Economics explores the role of risk and uncertainty in human economics within an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and ancient and modern history, the contributors range widely in time and space across hunting, farming and pastoralism, across ancient states, empires, and modern nation states. The aim, however, is a common one: to analyse in each case the structure of variability - particularly with regard to food supply - and review the range of responses offered by individual human communities. These responses commonly exploit various forms of mobility, economic diversification, storage, and exchange to deploy local or temporary abundance as a defence against shortage. Different levels of response are used at different levels of risk. Their success is fundamental to human survival and their adoption has important ramifications throughout cultural behaviour.

TWO OXEN AHEAD This revealing study of farming practices in societies around the Mediterranean draws out the valuable contribution that knowledge of recent practices can make to our understanding of husbandry in prehistoric and Greco-Roman times. It reflects increased academic interest in the formative influence of farming regimes on the societies they were designed to feed. The author’s intensive research took him to farming communities around the Mediterranean, where he recorded observational and interview data on differing farming strategies and practices, many of which can be traced back to classical antiquity or earlier. The book documents these variables, through the annual chaîne opératoire (from ploughing and sowing to harvesting and threshing), interannual schemes of crop rotation and husbandry, and the generational cycle of household development. It traces the interdependence of these successive stages and explores how cultural tradition, ecological conditions, and access to resources shape variability in husbandry practice. Each chapter identifies ways in which heuristic use of data on recent farming can shed light on ancient practices and societies.

Economic archaeology is the study of how past peoples exploited animals and plants, using as evidence the remains of those animals and plants. The animal side is usually termed zooarchaeology, the plant side archaeobotany. What distinguishes them from other studies of ancient animals and plants is that their ultimate aim is to find out about human behaviour – the animal and plant remains are a means to this end. The 33 papers present a wide array of topics covering many areas of archaeological interest. Aspects of method and theory, animal bone identification, human palaeopathology, prehistoric animal utilisation in South America, and the study of dog cemeteries are covered. The long-running controversy over the milking of animals and the use of dairy products by humans is discussed as is the ecological impact of hunting by farmers, with studies from Serbia and Syria. For Britain, coverage extends from Mesolithic Star Carr, via the origins of agriculture and the farmers of Lismore Fields, through considerations of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Outside Britain, papers discuss Neolithic subsistence in Cyprus and Croatia, Iron Age society in Spain, Medieval and post-medieval animal utilisation in northern Russia, and the claimed finding of a modern red deer skeleton in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. In exploring these themes, this volume celebrates the life and work of Tony Legge (zoo)archaeologist and teacher.

Collaboration between prehistorians and palaeoecologists is radically changing our understanding of the relationship between landscape, land use and human settlement in Greece. The chapters in this volume include case studies and broader syntheses, developments of both on-site and off-site field methodology, explorations of palaeoecological and archaeological evidence, and discussions of how the palaeoecological and archaeological records are formed. Contributions range geographically over the contrasting natural and cultural landscapes of northern and southern Greece and the lowlands and highlands, and chronologically over the whole postglacial period, including studies of plant and animal ecology and of palaeoecological formation processes in the present. The difficulty of disentangling climatic and anthropogenic causes of palaeoecological change is a recurrent theme.