Living In A Landscape Of Scarcity

In her close ethnography of a Dogon village of Mali, Laurence Douny shows how a microcosmology develops from people's embodied daily and ritual practice in a landscape of scarcity. Viewed through the lens of containment practice, she describes how they cope with the shortage of material items central to their lives—water, earth, and millet. Douny’s study is an important addition to ecological anthropology, to the study of West African cultures, to the understanding of material culture, and to anthropological theory.

Over the past century, women artists and writers have expressed diverse creative responses to the landscape of the Southwest. The Desert Is No Lady provides a cross-cultureal perspective on women by examining Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American women's artistic expressions and the effect of their art in defining the southwestern landscape. The Desert Is No Lady has been made into a motion picture of the same title by Women Make movies, New York, NY "A beautifully crafted book. . . . Although it varies in intensity, the response of women to the environment is virtually always different from the male frontiersman's view of the land as inanimate, boundless, conquerable and controllable." ÑPolly Wells Kaufman in Women's Review of Books "A powerful masterpiece." ÑEve Gruntfest in The Professional Geographer

Today, half the Netherlands is below sea level. Because of this, water-management is of key importance when it comes to maintaining present-day habitation of the Dutch low-lands. In prehistory, however, large parts of the Dutch landscape were highly dynamic due to ongoing fluvial sedimentation. Vast deltaic areas with ceaseless river activity formed the backdrop against which prehistoric occupation took place. Although such landscapes may seem inhospitable, the often excellently preserved archaeological evidence indicates that people lived in these lowlands throughout prehistory. This book describes why Bronze Age farmers were keen to settle here and how these prehistoric communities structured the landscape around their house-sites at various scales. Using a vast body of evidence from several large-scale excavations in the Dutch river area, the author reconstructs the changes in the cultural landscape over time. Starting from the Middle Neolithic, changing preferences for settlement site locations and changes in domestic architecture are traced in detail to the Iron Age. However, for proper understanding of the cultural landscape, not only settlements but also graves and patterns of object deposition - and their landscape characteristics - are discussed. By using evidence from over 50 major excavations, yielding over 300 house plans, this book contains by far the richest data-set on Dutch Bronze Age settlements. Most of these results have not previously been published in English, making this book of over 500 pages a true academic treasure for an international audience. The in-depth presentation of Bronze Age settlement sites, as well as the critical discussion of models and premises current in later prehistoric settlement archaeology, have an important relevance stretching beyond the Dutch lowland areas on which it is based. The wealth of high-quality Dutch data is presented as a synthesized (yet well-annotated) narrative, that rises above mere site interpretation, even more so due to its landscape-scale focus. Therefore this book is a must-have for those interested in later prehistoric cultural landscapes and settlement archaeology.

Landscape is one of the most fascinating assets of Europe. The great diversity in landscapes reflects a multitude of historical layers. This book presents the story of some of the most expressive European landscapes. It explores how engagement may safeguard and improve landscape identity for the future.

This publication contains the six main appendices to the PhD thesis "A Living Landscape: Bronze Age settlement sites in the Dutch river area (c. 2000-800 BC)" by Stijn Arnoldussen which was published by Sidestone Press in 2008. That study comprises an analysis of the nature (i.e. the constituent components) and dynamics (i.e. diachronic approaches to settlement dynamics) of the settlement sites. It aims to integrate and synthesize interpretations of Bronze Age settlements based on a number of large-scale excavations. The discussion of the archaeological and geological research on these sites, as well as more detailed source criticism and long-term overviews of the occupation histories of six (c. 30 km2) macro-regions around them, could for sake of conciseness not be incorporated into the main stud's text. However, such discussions contain critical information necessary to interpret the results and to evaluate their representativeness, and this information is now made available in this separate publication. While these texts are primarily appendices to the thesis, they can be read separately by those who are particularly interested in the the excavations at Zijderveld, Rumpt - Eigenblok, Wijk bij Duurstede, Meteren - De Bogen, Lienden - Kesteren or Dodewaard, which have been published in Dutch. In addition, the appendices provide a recent overview of the palaeogeographical development and occupation history of six large macro-regions in the Dutch river area. This information may be of relevance to those studying other sites within these macro-regions for the period under study (c. 2000-800 BC). Stijn Arnoldussen studied the prehistory of northwestern Europe at Leiden University and won the 'W. A. van Es' award for the best Dutch archaeological MA thesis. From 2003 to 2007 he was involved in a research project that focused on the Bronze Age cultural landscape in the Dutch river area. The present book is a result of this project. Stijn Arnoldussen is also co-editor of the book 'Bronze Age settlements in the Low Countries' (Oxbow Books, 2008). He is presently employed as a senior researcher with the Dutch National Service for Archaeology, Cultural Landscape and Built Heritage (RACM) and starting November 2008, he will be employed as a lecturer in later prehistory at the University of Groningen.

In this provocative book based on cutting-edge research, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that scarcity creates a distinct psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time, and why the same sugarcane farmers are smarter after harvest than before. Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus, and Scarcity reveals not only how it leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.

"Being able to 'read' the landscape whilst on a walk makes a huge difference. It is like suddenly seeing the world in colour after being used to a lifetime of black and white. The Living Landscape looks in detail at landscape formation: from rocks, through soil to vegetation and the intricate web of interactions between plants, animals, climate and the people that makes the landscape around us. Each chapter is interspersed with diagrams, sketches and notes that Patrick has taken over two decades of living and working in the countryside. Patrick will inspire you to reconnect with the land as a living entity, not a collection of different scenery, and develop an active relationship with nature and the countryside. This book invites you to actively engage with nature and experience it first hand. Understanding how landscapes evolve is a useful skill for landscape designers, farmers, gardeners and smallholders but it is also a life-enhancing skill all of us can enjoy. Patrick offers us the enduring pleasure that costs nothing and yet offers everything." -- Publisher's description