Human Landscapes

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity shows how today's environmental and ecological concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world, and how their perceptions affected society. The effects of human settlement and cultivation on the landscape are considered, as well as the representation of landscape in Attic drama. Various aspects of farming, such as the use of terraces and the significance of olive growing are examined. The uncultivated landscape was also important: hunting was a key social ritual for Greek and hellenistic elites, and 'wild' places were not wastelands but played an essential economic role. The Romans' attempts to control their environment are analyzed. This volume shows how Greeks and Romans worked hand in hand with their natural environment and not against it. It represents an outstanding collaboration between the disciplines of history and archaeology.

A Turkish epic poem offers portraits of varying lengths about ordinary people caught up in the wars, occupations, and independence of Turkey.

This book is a collection of papers highlighting ways in which Raptors have successfully adapted to man-made landscapes and structures. The coverage of Raptors in Human Landscapes is broad, ranging from the impact of human activity on country-wide scales to the particular conditions associated with urban, cultivated, and industrial landscapes, as well as to the various schemes specifically directed towards the provision of artificial nest sites and platforms. The cases described hail from a wide geographic range including North and South America, Europe, Africa and elsewhere, and from a broad spectrum of species groups such as the falcons, accipiters, eagles, kites, and many others. This is a book of immense value not only to ornithologists and conservation biologists, but also to engineers and managers involved in all kinds of building and environmental work in cities, power and water works, agriculture, and forestry. Serves as a good introduction to all aspects of the subject Focuses on successful adaptations of Raptors to environmental change

Associating social justice with landscape is not new, yet the twenty-first century's heightened threats to landscape and their impact on both human and, more generally, nature's habitats necessitate novel intellectual tools to address such challenges. This book offers that innovative critical thinking framework. The establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, in the aftermath of Second World War atrocities, was an aspiration to guarantee both concrete necessities for survival and the spiritual/emotional/psychological needs that are quintessential to the human experience. While landscape is place, nature and culture specific, the idea transcends nation-state boundaries and as such can be understood as a universal theoretical concept similar to the way in which human rights are perceived. The first step towards the intellectual interface between landscape and human rights is a dynamic and layered understanding of landscape. Accordingly, the 'Right to Landscape' is conceived as the place where the expansive definition of landscape, with its tangible and intangible dimensions, overlaps with the rights that support both life and human dignity, as defined by the UDHR. By expanding on the concept of human rights in the context of landscape this book presents a new model for addressing human rights - alternative scenarios for constructing conflict-reduced approaches to landscape-use and human welfare are generated. This book introduces a rich new discourse on landscape and human rights, serving as a platform to inspire a diversity of ideas and conceptual interpretations. The case studies discussed are wide in their geographical distribution and interdisciplinary in the theoretical situation of their authors, breaking fresh ground for an emerging critical dialogue on the convergence of landscape and human rights.

This volume is designed as a 12-lecture textbook, which can serve as a course companion, self teaching guide and handbook for basic concepts. Each lecture comprises 20 pages, in which the methods are introduced, examples shown and the code is given. All examples are computed with open source software, mainly R, and with archaeological data available from the book's website. The book does not describe elaborated high-end models but rather very basic modelling concepts that serve as components in more complex models. The book enables the reader to construct such models by themselves and be sensitive for certain problems. In addition it gives hints for the interpretation of the results. Students are usually quick to apply fancy methods yet fail in the proper interpretation due to a lack of understanding of the underlying principles. This problem is addressed by the proposed book through three concepts: 1. Command line software forces the students to first learn some details before they are able to produce results on their own. 2. The book is focused on principles and methods. When the students understand a few basic principles, they have far better access to a wide range of related methods. 3. Examples of poor analysis highlight common pitfalls. The volume attempts to be an applied, minimalistic and efficient textbook and is based upon several successful courses.

Fourteen papers are presented here in honour of John Gowlett. John has a wide range of research interests primarily focused on the human genus Homo and is a world leader in understanding the cognitive and behavioural preconditions necessary for the emergence of complex behaviours such as language and art.

The Himalayas are said to be the youngest mountain ranges in the world. This book studies the well-being of the eastern Himalayan forest-dwellers in terms of their capabilities and functioning. Using Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach, it examines the educational and health opportunities and substantial freedoms afforded to farmers and pastoralists living and working in the Senchal and Singalila Protected Areas of North Bengal, India. It also discusses the challenges and potential of the Forest Rights Act as a well-being delivery mechanism. The book adopts a comparative narrative of socio-ecological information generated from interviews, ecological field methods, remote sensing and participatory rural appraisals to provide insight on human development in conservation contexts. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of conservation biology, development studies, socio-ecological systems studies, political ecology, human development index, ecological economics, environmental sociology, and South Asian studies. It will also be useful to policy-makers and NGOs in the conservation and livelihoods sector.