bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Why ecologists and conservation biologists use remote sensing
Authors: Horning Ned , Robinson Julie A. , Sterling Eleanor J. , Turner Woody , Spector Sacha
Published: November 2020

This chapter addresses a question that we hope occurs to many ecologists and conservation biologists: How can remotely sensed data and methods support the conservation of biological diversity? We highlight the contributions remote sensing technologies make toward advancing our understanding of Earth and its varied biomes. You can use this information for applications ranging from researching habitat use by species to making decisions on how best to manage a protected area. The chapter starts off with an overview of the motivation behind this book and a description of the intended audience. We present a broad array of applications of remote sensing technologies in the field of conservation biology and conclude with a brief summary of the remaining chapters of this book. Our overarching goal in publishing this book is to increase awareness about, and use of, remotely sensed data and methods in conservation biology and ecology. The objective of this book is to make remote sensing tools accessible so that ecologists and conservation biologists can assess the tools they need, have enough information to recognize effective uses and abuses of remote sensing, and know when to try to use the tools themselves versus when to solicit help from others. The broadest definition of remote sensing refers to measuring a particular quality (such as the intensity of light reflected) of a feature without being in physical contact with the feature itself. The magnitude of objects observed can range from the microscopic to the astronomic. In this book, however, we will limit our definition of remote sensing to measurements acquired from either airborne or orbiting platforms, with the features of interest located on or just above the surface of the Earth. Furthermore, we will focus primarily on remotely sensed data recorded in an image format since these are the data most commonly used in biodiversity conservation applications. Conservation biology has grown from local and regional studies of single species into a discipline concerned with the complex interactions of species and their environment at global, regional, and local scales as well as across scales.
Linking remote sensing with modeling
Authors: Horning Ned , Robinson Julie A. , Sterling Eleanor J. , Turner Woody , Spector Sacha
Published: November 2020

Conservation biologists and natural resource managers often require detailed, accurate information on natural resources or biodiversity elements such as species, landscapes, and ecosystems. Their patterns of occurrence and their responses to environmental disturbance or change are dynamic over space and time and may be mediated by complex ecological processes. In most cases, our ability to directly measure or comprehensively map biodiversity elements is limited by human or financial resources, and logistical challenges such as difficulties in accessing terrain or short field seasons. In other situations, we might want to make quantitative inferences about, say, the kinds of environments that are most suitable for the persistence of an endangered species, or the influence of landscape modification on its highest-quality habitat. In these cases, developing models that explain and predict the patterns of biodiversity elements can help provide guidance at scales and resolutions that are not available through direct measurement. For example, Goetz et al. (2007) employed lidar data to predict the bird species richness across a 5,315 ha temperate forest reserve, the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge (PWNR) in the eastern United States. In this study, Goetz et al. derived and mapped several measures of forest canopy structure, including canopy height, and three descriptors of the vertical distribution of canopy elements. In addition to lidar, they also used optical remotely sensed data from two dates of Landsat ETM+ to derive NDVI during the growing season and the difference between the NDVI of leaf-on and leaf-off conditions (growing season versus winter). Testing three different quantitative statistical models (stepwise multiple linear regression, generalized additive models, and regression trees) to predict bird species richness, the authors used field survey data on the birds of the PWNR that were collected at a series of fixed points across the reserve as the training data for the response variable (bird species richness). To calibrate the model, they combined the habitat descriptors with the survey data, usually reserving 25 percent of the survey data to validate each model’s results.
A Re-Assessment of the Enclosure at Lugg, County Dublin, Ireland
Authors: Roche Helen , Eogan George
Published: November 2020

The purpose of this contribution is to re-evaluate Lugg, a somewhat unusual site and to assign it chronologically to the Late Bronze Age period. The site is in an area that is ‘facing the ocean’ to use Barry Cunliffe’s memorable phrase. This general area is well known to Barry, a region to which he has contributed so much over many years, both from the point of view of detailed Weldwork, interpretation and wider comparative studies. Time-wise the site fits into a main period of Barry’s interests and accordingly we oVer this contribution in appreciation of his academic work as well as the positive role that he has played in aiding the development of Irish archaeological studies. Lugg is one of at least a dozen archaeological sites located on Saggart Hill, about 18km southwest of Dublin city (figure 10.1). Prior to excavation in 1939 by Howard Kilbride-Jones, it was thought that the site with its enclosing bank and central mound might represent a disc-barrow. However, a preliminary survey (Kilbride-Jones 1950: 315) revealed that the mound had a surrounding ditch as well as the visible bank and this complex central monument was in turn surrounded by a bank and ditch, (enclosing an area about 37m in diameter), which alerted the excavator to the fact that the site might be more complex than previously envisaged (figure 10.2). Excavation subsequently revealed a complex range of features that were interpreted as representing three phases of activity and, based on the identification of the pottery, were assigned to the Iron Age period. Phase 1 representing the earliest activity consisted of a timber monument that was termed a ‘Sanctuary- Site’. The second phase was interpreted as representing a habitation site and the final phase was described as being a modified ‘henge’ monument (ibid. 1950: 316). The evidence for Kilbride-Jones’ earliest phase, which he referred to by the then popular term of a ‘sanctuary-site’, was located mainly beneath the central mound with further areas located in the wide level area (called a berm by Kilbride-Jones) between the inner and outer enclosures. The evidence consisted of three fireplaces, limited areas of paving and one hundred and sixty post- and stake-holes.
Decoration and Demon Traps: The Meanings of Geometric Borders in Roman Mosaics
Authors: Manley John
Published: November 2020

The thousands of mosaics that survive from the Greek and especially Roman worlds are taken by many to be one of the great surviving artistic hallmarks of these two classical civilizations. The decorative variety of the floors, made usually and mostly from small stone tesserae, strikes a chord with those who view them as works of art (Neal and Cosh 2002: 9). They appear testimony to the erudition of the patrons who commissioned them, to the skilled artists who composed and executed the designs, and to the knowledge of those ancients who walked over them and who were able to interpret knowingly what was beneath their feet. Viewing them in a museum context, many of us judge them as we would an eighteenth-century watercolour or an early Picasso—the end product of inspirational artistic endeavour. The near complete absence of written references from the ancient world regarding mosaics means that we are forced to generate meanings from the floors themselves. What I want to suggest in this chapter is an alternative way of looking at mosaics. I am going to draw on ethnographic and anthropological research to provide additional insights to the archaeological study of mosaics. I want to argue that there is something to be explained in the sheer constancy of some of the geometric borders on mosaics through the Hellenistic and Roman periods—a period of some seven centuries. This constancy is also apparent in overall design in large areas of the Roman Empire. For instance in the northwest provinces, including Britain, the enduring emphasis is on the pattern, and the picture-panels are fitted within this pattern, often in a series of more or less equally weighted panels. These kinds of stability need their explanations just as much as change does. I particularly want to focus on the abstract and geometric borders—for example the meander, the guilloche, the wave-pattern—and seek to understand why these motifs were utilized across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. I want to take a different approach to that taken by scholarly interpreters who seek to find layers of meaning in figurative representations and then ascribe them to erudite ancient patrons (pace Perring 2003).
Major sensory and motor systems
Authors: Atkinson Martin E.
Published: November 2020

The previous chapter provided an overview of the anatomy of the CNS, concentrating on structures that can be seen during dissection of the human brain and spinal cord or the study of anatomical models of these structures. Some indication of the function of different components of the CNS has been given in Chapter 15, but this chapter shows how the various anatomical components of the CNS are functionally linked together through sensory and motor pathways. These pathways enable the nervous system to convey information over considerable distances, to integrate the information, and formulate functional responses that coordinate activities of different parts of the body. It will be necessary to introduce some other structures in addition to those described in Chapter 15 during the description of major pathways; most are not visible to the naked eye and even when seen in microscopical sections, they require considerable practice to distinguish them. However, they are important landmarks or relay stations in the central nervous pathways and you need to know of them for a full understanding of pathways. As emphasized in Chapter 14, our views of the structure and function of many aspects of the nervous system are constantly subject to revision in the light of new clinical and experimental observations and methods of investigation. This applies to nerve pathways just as much as any other aspect of the nervous system. This chapter presents a summary of current views on somatic sensory and motor functions and their application to the practice of dentistry. The special sensory pathways of olfaction, vision, and hearing are described in Chapter 18 in the context of the cranial nerves that form the first part of these pathways. The information conveyed from the periphery by the sensory components of spinal and cranial nerves is destined to reach the cerebral cortex or the cerebellum. You will be conscious of sensory information that reaches the cerebral cortex, but mostly unaware of information that does not travel to the cortex. However, this does not mean that sensory information that does not attain cortical levels is of no value. For example, sensory neurons or their collateral processes form the afferent limbs of many reflex arcs.
The temporomandibular joints, muscles of mastication, and the infratemporal and pterygopalatine fossae
Authors: Atkinson Martin E.
Published: November 2020

It is essential that dental students and practitioners understand the structure and function of the temporomandibular joints and the muscles of mastication and other muscle groups that move them. The infratemporal fossa and pterygopalatine fossa are deep to the mandible and its related muscles; many of the nerves and blood vessels supplying the structures of the mouth run through or close to these areas, therefore, knowledge of the anatomy of these regions and their contents is essential for understanding the dental region. The temporomandibular joints (TMJ) are the only freely movable articulations in the skull together with the joints between the ossicles of the middle ear; they are all synovial joints. The muscles of mastication move the TMJ and the suprahyoid and infrahyoid muscles also play a significant role in jaw movements. The articular surfaces of the squamous temporal bone and of the condylar head (condyle) of the mandible form each temporomandibular joint. These surfaces have been briefly described in Chapter 22 on the skull and Figure 24.1A indicates their shape. The concave mandibular fossa is the posterior articulating surface of each squamous temporal bone and houses the mandibular condyle at rest. The condyle is translated forwards on to the convex articular eminence anterior to the mandibular fossa during jaw movements. The articular surfaces of temporomandibular joints are atypical; they covered by fibrocartilage (mostly collagen with some chondrocytes) instead of hyaline cartilage found in most other synovial joints. Figures 24.1B and 24.1C show the capsule and ligaments associated with the TMJ. The tough, fibrous capsule is attached above to the anterior lip of the squamotympanic fissure and to the squamous bone around the margin of the upper articular surface and below to the neck of the mandible a short distance below the limit of the lower articular surface. The capsule is slack between the articular disc and the squamous bone, but much tighter between the disc and the neck of the mandible. Part of the lateral pterygoid muscle is inserted into the anterior surface of the capsule. As in other synovial joints, the non-load-bearing internal surfaces of the joint are covered with synovial membrane.
Radiological anatomy of the oral cavity
Authors: Atkinson Martin E.
Published: November 2020

The radiographs most frequently taken in general dental practice are of the teeth and their immidiate supporting tissues for detection of dental caries or assessment of bone loss in periodontal disease. Intraoral radiographs are taken by placing the X-ray-sensitive film or receptor in the mouth close to the teeth being investigated. Extraoral radiographs use larger films or receptors positioned externally and produce a view of the entire dentition and its supporting structures on a single film; they are used to ascertain the state of development of the dentitions prior to orthodontic treatment, for example. Dental panoramic tomographs (DPTs) are the most frequent extraoral radiographs. A radiograph is a negative photographic record. Dense structures such as bone are designated as radio-opaque; they absorb some X-rays and appear white on radiographs. More X-rays pass through less dense radiolucent structures such as air-filled cavities which show up as black areas. The contrast between different tissues of the structures which the X-ray beam passes through is determined by their radiodensity which, in turn, is largely due to their content of metallic elements. Calcium and iron are the prevalent heavy metals in the body. Calcium is combined with phosphate to form hydroxyapatite crystals in bones and mineralized tissues in teeth. Iron is present in haemoglobin in blood, but only large concentrations of blood, such as those found within the heart chambers, show up on X-rays. In sequence from densest to most lucent, the radiodensity of the dental and periodontal tissues are: enamel, dentine, cementum, compact bone, cancellous bone, demineralized carious enamel and dentine, dental soft tissues such as pulp and periodontal ligament, and air; gold and silver–mercury amalgam metallic restorative materials are even denser than enamel. A radiograph is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional situation. The orientation of anatomical structures relative to the X-ray beam is a major factor determining their appearance on the film. For example, a beam travelling through the long axis of a radiodense structure will produce a whiter image on the film than one passing through its shorter axis because more X-rays are absorbed; the structure will also have a different shape.
A Downward Spiral?: Combating Paranoia
Authors: Freeman Daniel , Freeman Jason
Published: November 2020

This cri de coeur appeared on the front page of the Sun, Britain’s top-selling newspaper, on 21 January 2008. The previous week had seen the conviction of the killers of 47-year-old Garry Newlove. Late on the night of 10 August 2007, Newlove had heard noises outside his home in Warrington, a Lancashire town previously best-remembered for being the unlikely target of two IRA bombs in 1993. He confronted a gang of drunken teenagers, who promptly punched and kicked him to death. The outraged lament on the Sun’s front page was in fact quoted from a letter to the paper from one Dr Stuart Newton, a former head teacher. And forming a melancholy border around his words were the faces of fifteen high-profile murder victims. The message was unmistakable, conveyed with the newspaper’s usual clarity: the country is going to the dogs; the streets are not safe for respectable folk to walk; our youth is out of control. ‘In parts of our country there is social breakdown. Society stops at the front door of our house and the streets have been lost and we’ve got to reclaim them’, agreed Conservative Party leader David Cameron. And the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, confessed that she felt uncomfortable walking in London after dark (her words, explained an official, ‘hadn’t come out as she had intended’ and, by way of proof, Ms Smith had recently gone so far as to purchase a kebab on the inner-city streets of Peckham). But where, you might wonder, is the news in all this? The reference to ‘feral youths’ is distinctively contemporary (rampaging teenagers being, as it were, one of the foul flavours of our day). But has there ever been a time when newspapers—and perhaps indeed the rest of us too—haven’t been decrying the ‘downward spiral of Britain’? The fact that one of the faces staring out from the Sun’s front page is that of Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death in a racist attack in south London in April 1993—fifteen years ago—can be read as a discreet allusion to the timelessness of this nostalgia for a better, safer world.
Ancient South-East Asia
Authors: Ortloff Charles R.
Published: November 2020

Cambodia is situated in southeast Asia on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand and shares borders with Vietnam to the east, Thailand to the west, and Laos to the north. Lake Tonle Sap occupies ~2.5% of Cambodia’s land area and plays a vital role in the rice agriculture of the country. The total cultivatable area is about 2.1 million hectares, of which 1.8 million is devoted to rice agriculture. The growing season is largely coupled to the monsoon cycles: the bimodal wet season starts in May and ends in October with peaks in June and September/ October resulting from diVerent rainfall origins. Rainfall levels vary around the country: although average levels are about 1.5 m, amounts vary from about 1.0m at Svay Check in the western province of Banteay Meanchey to nearly 4.7m in the southern province of Kampot. The Tonle Sap River reverses flow twice each year: from July to October, water flows into Tonle Sap Lake from branches of the Mekong River, swelling its area from 2,600 to 10,500 km2; in November when the flow rate of the Mekong River decreases, the Tonle Sap River reverses flow and water flows into the Mekong once again. Since 85% of Cambodia’s land area is included in the Mekong River basin, river water levels coupled to groundwater levels play a role in agricultural systems. The dry season from November to April requires irrigation to support rice agriculture making water storage and high groundwater levels important. Based on recent research (FAO 2005), the net renewable water balance (volume in flows minus volume) is equal to about 120km3 with about 18 km3 stored in groundwater reduced by 13 km3 per year by river drainage. Of the total amount of water withdrawal per year (520_106m3), about 94% is devoted to agriculture; given the dependence on rice farming through the ages, it is likely that a similar percentage was used for agriculture in ancient times as now to support like-sized agrarian populations. In the 10th to 14th centuries ce, Angkor’s water supply system was based on four (baray) reservoirs (not all functioning simultaneously) with a total capacity of 100–150_106m3.
Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management Strategies ofAncient Societies
Authors: Ortloff Charles R.
Published: November 2020

Societies of widely different social, economic, political, religious, and technical innovation characteristics in opposing world hemispheres developed urban and rural population centres with water and agricultural systems to maintain stable economies and expanding populations. Despite vast historical, cultural, and world view differences between these societies, one common thread united them: the necessity for mastery of engineering skills to provide water for cities and agricultural systems. Although it may be thought that the technical basis to support water engineering practice is accompanied with pre-scientific concepts, many recent discoveries reveal the contrary: sophistication in the concept, design, and execution of water supply and distribution systems indicating knowledge of hydraulic principles beyond the scant hydraulics literature that survived the centuries. In the absence of ancient treatises on hydraulics practices, archaeological analysis of hydraulics works coupled with modern analysis methods provides a way to understand their technological accomplishments through ‘reverse engineering’ methodologies involving computer modelling techniques. Thus computer methodologies play a role to uncover the design intent, functionality, and operation of ancient water systems to provide insight into ancient engineering practices and their theoretical/empirical basis. In South American archaeology, the large variation in ecological conditions and landscape barriers provided the stage for the rise of civilizations and largely determined their agricultural practices. As an example, the Chimú civilization (800–1480 CE) occupied Peruvian coastal regions extending 500 km from the southern Chillon Valley to the northern Lambeyeque Valley. The desert coastal zone extends only a few kilometres inland from the Pacific Ocean before being bounded by the Cordillera Negra mountain chain. Agriculture was possible in coastal alluvial valleys through networks of canal systems originating from intermittent seasonal rivers. The temperature near the equator is near constant throughout the year while coastal rainfall averages about 2mm/year; occasional massive El Niño events which can deposit up to 150cm of rainfall in a few days occasionally break this pattern and cause extensive flooding and Weld erosion. Clearly, hydraulic practices related to the control of limited (and sometime excessive) water resources were vital for survival. Defensive measures to protect fill aqueduct structures against excessive El Niño rainfall and flooding events are expected to appear in the technology base as flood control was vital to sustainability.
Disease Changes: Microbial and Vector Adaptation
Authors: Cliff A. D. , Smallman-Raynor M.R. , Haggett P. , Stroup D.F. , Thacker S.B.
Published: November 2020

In this and the next four chapters, we examine five change agents which have facilitated the emergence and re-emergence of infectious human diseases. Each agent—microbial and genetic adaptation, technology and industry, changes in host populations, environmental and ecological change, and war as a disease amplifier—has underpinned over the centuries both the appearance of new diseases and the waxing and waning of familiar infections. As shown in Figure II.1, the agents are not independent and commonly interact in complex ways to facilitate microbe emergence and re-emergence at different times and in different geographical locations. Accordingly, we also explore these interactions in our account. We begin here with microbial and vector adaptation. Disease microbes are in a continuous state of evolution, responding and adapting to the challenges and opportunities afforded by their hosts and their environments (Morse 1995). New pathogens are evolving, old pathogens are developing enhanced virulence and new clinical expressions, and susceptible pathogens are acquiring resistance to antimicrobial agents. In parallel, the environmental tolerance bands of both old and new pathogens are also changing (Cohen 1998). Not only are disease microbes in a continuous state of evolution. So, too, are the arthropod vectors that transmit many human pathogens. In the second half of the twentieth century, many of these vectors have developed tolerance to an expanding range of insecticides, larvicides, pupicides, and other chemical agents used in their control (World Health Organization 1992c). Against this background, our examination of microbial change and vector adaptation is structured around the three interlinked themes shown in Figure 4.1. We begin in Section 4.2 by examining the issue of natural variation in pathogens and illustrate this with special reference to the emergence and spread of novel subtypes of influenza A virus. We then examine the topic of selective pressure and genetic change in the context of the man-made problems of pathogen resistance to antimicrobials (Section 4.3) and vector resistance to insecticides (Section 4.4). The processes of microbial change and vector adaptation are not intrinsically geographical but they take place within, and are inextricably linked to, specific geographical environments. This gives a strong geographical emphasis to our discussion.
Institutions, Organizations, and Policy Affecting Land Change: Complexity Within and Beyond the Ejido
Authors: Klepeis Peter , Chowdhury Rinku Roy
Published: November 2020

Despite decades of colonization and development initiatives, the southern Yucatán peninsular region remains an economic frontier. The term ‘frontier’, however, hides a complex political economy of social, political, and economic structures in which land managers operate. Presently, multiple interest groups vie for influence, increasingly positioning themselves around sustainability concerns, and attempting to reconcile the competing goals of economic development and environmental preservation. The major political institutions and organizations promoting conservation and development in the region fit into five categories: federally decreed land management regimes, federal and state secretariats, local community-based groups and institutions, national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international accords. These institutions and organizations aim to influence land-use decisions in the dominant land access unit, the ejido. The relationships among ejidos, social movements, NGOs, government policy, and international activity in the region are examined here, highlighting how even within a frontier economy, conservation and development visions increasingly influence resource use. Before the Mexican revolution of 1910–17, 96 per cent of Mexico’s rural people were landless (Sinha 1984). These rural poor supported the revolution, in large part, to break up grand haciendas (estates) and to allow campesinos (peasants) access to agricultural land. Ejidos, one of four landtenure types federally mandated, were designed to provide campesinos access to land that could not be transferred easily and thereby taken from them. Based on interpretations of pre-Hispanic land tenure, Article 27 of the Constitution established ejido land to be communal, ruled by an ejido assembly (consisting of all members with land rights in the ejido, or ejidatarios), and used in ejido-defined usufruct. Prior to 1992, when the law was reformed, ejidatarios were prevented from selling their land, renting it, or using it as collateral, and from negotiating deals with private investors. Perhaps more important than these official guidelines, however, are the perceptions of ejidos by state officials. Established, in part, to protect ‘indigenous’ people and not open to privatization, the ejido was stigmatized as ill-suited for modernization (Oasa and Jennings 1982). A bimodal Mexican agrarian policy followed (de Janvry 1981; Tomich, Kilby, and Johnston 1995) in which the potential productive role of ejidatarios was largely ignored (Oasa and Jennings 1982; Sonnenfeld 1992; Tomich, Kilby, and Johnston 1995).
The Ejido Household: The Current Agent of Change
Authors: Vance Colin , Klepeis Peter
Published: November 2020

The ejidatario is the primary agent of land change in the region today, recognizing that this decision-maker is influenced by various policies and programs, both federal and NGO in origin (Ch. 7). Although colonization of the region, especially during the past forty years, has produced a diverse mix of ethnicities, cultural attributes, and economic characteristics, it is still appropriate to speak of a typical ejido household. The characterization of these households detailed here is based in large part on a SYPR project survey conducted in 1997 and 1998, designed to represent the entire study region. Subsequent surveys have been directed to specific issues, such as chili (Ch. 10) and the role of institutions; information from these studies is specified when used here. Most production within the ejido sector of the study region is organized around the semi-subsistence farm (or dual) household (Ch. 11). This unit of production is both a family and an enterprise (Ellis 1993), with the implication that decisions concerning what, how, and how much to produce are made in response to both market signals and the biological and cultural imperatives of the family unit. This chapter explores the socio-economic and farm characteristics of the sampled ejidatario households and presents relevant descriptive statistics. The data demonstrate that the ejido household has been exceptionally dynamic since the late 1960s, moving from a primarily maize-production orientation to a more diversified household economy. A standardized questionnaire with formal and open-ended components was used to elicit socio-economic and land-use data from ejidatario heads of household. In order to ensure a representative sample, data collection proceeded according to a stratified, two-stage cluster sample, with ejidos as the first stage unit and ejidatarios as the second stage unit (Deaton 1997; Warwick and Luinger 1975). The strata were delineated such that ejidos from across the region were represented in the sample, thereby capturing variability in both environmental conditions and in the influence of proximity to roads and markets. This strategy resulted in the random selection of eleven ejidos followed by the random selection of 199 ejidatario households (see Vance 2000 for details), which produced 188 completed surveys.
Houses and Households: The Archaeology of Buildings
Authors: Hamerow Helena
Published: November 2020

As Rapoport suggests, a house is more than merely a shelter against the elements. The built environment and the way space is organized within the house reflect and reinforce social organization. While this is obviously true of the great hall in Beowulf, it is equally, if less obviously, true of ordinary houses. If, furthermore, we are to assess the economic conditions and daily life of the early Middle Ages, we need to understand the nature of the buildings in which people lived and worked. Indeed, the study of early medieval settlements in northwest Europe has traditionally been dominated by the study of buildings, chiefly for two reasons: first, on a small number of waterlogged sites, buildings (which were, with few exceptions, constructed entirely of timber) are extraordinarily well preserved, with walls standing in some cases up to a metre or more in height (Fig. 2.1); and second, other categories of artefacts, with the exception of pottery, are usually scarce. In the great majority of settlements, floor layers contemporary with the use of the buildings have been destroyed by later erosion or ploughing, and only the debris which collected or was discarded in pits and ditches survives. Even where none of the timber superstructure survives, the ground-plans of these buildings, etched into the subsoil as patterns of postholes, reveal that they could be imposing structures. A fifth-century longhouse at Flögeln-Eekhöltjen (Lower Saxony) measured an extraordinary 63.5 m in length (Zimmermann 1992a, 139). A seventh- to tenth-century hall at Lejre (on the island of Zealand) was comparable in floor area (over 550m2) to the halls of the Carolingian palaces at Paderborn and Frankfurt, and is estimated to have stood up to 4 metres in height (Fig. 2.2; Christensen 1991; Winkelmann 1971; Stamm 1955). Of similarly lofty dimensions was a Migration period hall recently excavated at Gudme, on Funen, whose main roof-supporting posts were set into massive pits (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4). The fact that these timber buildings have naturally fared less well in the archaeological record than their more durable stone counterparts in former imperial territories has often led to gross underestimates of their size, complexity, and quality.
Land and Power: Settlements in the Territorial Context
Authors: Hamerow Helena
Published: November 2020

As settlements became more clearly bounded and fixed in the landscape, so too did territories based on landed production, which became increasingly intensive and politically controlled (as we shall see in Chapter 5). These territories became formalized when leaders were able to exercise authority within them by protecting clients through juridical and/or military means, and by extracting surplus from, and controlling access to, landed resources. The identification of communities and individuals with a particular territory or region, whether this was defined by shared markets, dialect, military allegiances, or other commonalities, must also have grown in importance in this period, as ties of ethnicity and kinship began to give ground to bonds of clientship and rank. The formalization of territories was of course key to the formation of early kingdoms. What can archaeology tell us about the effects of territorialization and estate formation on rural communities? Certain regular features govern territorial formation in pre-industrial societies. In particular, universal ‘push–pull’ factors underlie the territorial structure and settlement pattern of agrarian communities. Briefly stated, every community needs to establish a territory in order to keep neighbouring communities at a distance and preserve its resources (‘push’ factors), but the necessity of maintaining certain social ties between communities, such as marriage, trade, and shared defence (‘pull’ factors), will act to minimize the distance between them (Heidinga 1987, 157). For example, the distribution of settlement in the Veluwe district of the central Netherlands shows that the northeast and the southwest regions were largely empty in the seventh century, even though their soils were suitable for farming and they were occupied both before and after this period. They lay outside the core area of the seventh-century resettlement of the Veluwe, however, and it appears that communities chose not to spread out thinly across the entire territory, but rather to remain relatively close to one another (Heidinga 1987, 162). In the Netherlands, Germany, and England, early territories could, under certain circumstances, be remarkably stable and survive to be detected in much later boundaries (e.g. Waterbolk 1982 and 1991a; Cunliffe 1973; Janssen 1976). In view of this stability and the behavioural ‘rules’ which appear to govern territorial formation, some archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct proto-historic territories. Several presuppositions underlie such reconstruction. The first is that the ‘push–pull’ factors already mentioned invariably operate between neighbouring communities.
Rural Centres, Trade, and Non-Agrarian Production
Authors: Hamerow Helena
Published: November 2020

In contrast to the relative scarcity of publications dealing with the buildings and layouts of rural settlements, many volumes have been devoted to the development of early medieval trade and craft production (e.g. Jankuhn et al. 1981; 1983; K. Düwel et al. 1987, vols. 1–4; Hodges and Whitehouse 1983). Archaeological research into these topics has been made more fruitful—as well as more complex—by the contributions of neighbouring disciplines such as history, geography, and numismatics. It has, however, tended to focus almost exclusively on towns, monasteries, and royal centres, yet craft production, trade, and exchange also played a significant role in farming communities before and after the emergence of such specialized centres. Indeed, the rural settlements of northwest Europe were already significantly differentiated in their economies in the Migration period, suggesting a high level of socio-economic complexity several centuries earlier than has generally been supposed. The evidence now available for trade and non-agrarian production, which derives almost wholly from archaeology, calls for a thoroughgoing reassessment of when and how centralized authorities emerged in northern Europe after the collapse of the western Empire. This is particularly true for northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, where early state formation has conventionally been dated to the late Viking period. Research into state formation has in the past focused on the origins of towns and market centres, the latter usually seen as arising from participation in long-distance trade which was controlled by kings or magnates. Yet, several centuries before there were kings or towns in northern Europe, rural settlements emerged which point to a degree of political centralization. This chapter considers the evidence for these rural centres and the role of non-agrarian production and exchange in rural settlements generally: what was the scale and context of the production, distribution, and consumption of non-agrarian goods? Who controlled these activities, and how, if at all, did the long-distance trade networks which fuelled the nascent towns of Merovingian and Viking Age Europe affect the economies of the communities which lay in their hinterlands?
Sheep, Pastures, and Demography in Australia
Authors: Beinart William , Hughes Lotte
Published: November 2020

Succeeding phases of British economic growth prompted strikingly different imperatives for expansion, for natural resource exploitation, and for the social organization of extra-European production. In the eighteenth century, sugar, African slaves, and shipping in the Atlantic world provided one major dynamic of empire. But in the nineteenth century, antipodean settlement and trade, especially that resulting from expanding settler pastoral frontiers, was responsible for some of the most dramatic social and environmental transformations. Plantations occupied relatively little space in the new social geography of world production. By contrast, commercial pastoralism, which took root most energetically in the temperate and semi-arid regions of the newly conquered world, was land-hungry but relatively light in its demands for labour. The Spanish Empire based in Mexico can be considered a forerunner. By the 1580s, within fifty years of their introduction, there were an estimated 4.5 million merino sheep in the Mexican highlands. The livestock economy, incorporating cattle as well as sheep, spread northwards through Mexico to what became California by the eighteenth century. Settler intrusions followed in the vast landmasses of southern Latin America, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Australia was one of the last-invaded of these territories, and, in respect of the issues that we are exploring, was in some senses distinctive. Unlike Canada and South Africa, there was no long, slow period of trade and interaction with the indigenous population; like the Caribbean, the Aboriginal people were quickly displaced by disease and conquest. The relative scale of the pastoral economy was greater than in any other British colony. Supply of meat and dairy products to rapidly growing ports and urban centres was one priority for livestock farmers. Cattle ranching remained a major feature of livestock production in Australia. Bullock-carts, not dissimilar to South African ox-wagons, were essential for Australian transport up to the 1870s. But for well over a century, from the 1820s to the 1950s and beyond, sheep flooded the southern lands. Although mutton became a significant export from New Zealand and South America, wool was probably the major product of these pastoral hinterlands—and a key focus of production in Australia and South Africa. The growth in antipodean sheep numbers was staggering.
Colonial Cities: Environment, Space, and Race
Authors: Beinart William , Hughes Lotte
Published: November 2020

Colonial cities have dotted our narrative as points on the emerging map of imperial commodity extraction or as centres of transport and administration. In this chapter, the first to adopt a synthetic overview approach, our attention turns specifically to urban zones, their changing role in the emerging spatial and environmental history of empire, and the character of their built environments. Cities will also be a specific focus in discussing the environmentally linked disease of bubonic plague (Chapter 10). Cities transform, sometimes obliterate, nature in their immediate environments. Such urban concentrations have also acted as hinges for the broader process of environmental and social change across large swathes of land described in the first half of this book. Cities, as human creations, sometimes seem to have ‘broken from nature’. Yet the rise of many colonial cities was intimately connected with the changing relationships between people and nature in the regions they touched. We will argue that their environmental boot-prints were varied and hybrid in character, but in part moulded by specifically British planning and styles. British trade, shipping, and planning helped to plant the kernel of new cities across the globe. Of the fifty largest cities in the world by the early twenty-first century, fifteen had at least partial roots in the British Empire, and if US cities founded in the colonial period are included (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington), the total is nineteen. British imperialism may not, alone, have been ‘the greatest creator of towns’ but urbanism was surely one of ‘the most lasting of the British imperial legacies’. Nine of those fifteen are in areas of South Asia which fell under British control; three—Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg—are in Africa. Imperialism also contributed to the rise of British ports and manufacturing towns, and the growth of London. London was the largest city in the world at the height of the British Empire between the 1820s, when it overtook Beijing, and 1925, when it was overtaken by New York. Its population expanded from about 1.3 million in 1825 to a height of nearly 9 million around 1950.
Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in East and Central Africa
Authors: Beinart William , Hughes Lotte
Published: November 2020

Disease, we have argued, influenced patterns of colonization, especially in West Africa, the Americas, and Australia (Chapter 2). In turn, imperial transport routes facilitated the spread of certain diseases, such as bubonic plague. This chapter expands our discussion of environmentally related diseases by focusing on trypanosomiasis, carried by tsetse fly, in East and Central Africa. Unlike plague, this disease of humans and livestock was endemic and restricted to particular ecological zones in Africa. But as in the case of plague, the changing incidence of trypanosomiasis was at least in part related to imperialism and colonial intrusion in Africa. Coastal East Africa presented some of the same barriers to colonization as West Africa. Portugal maintained a foothold in South-East Africa for centuries, and its agents expanded briefly onto the Zimbabwean plateau in the seventeenth century, but could not command the interior. Had these early incursions been more successful, southern Africa may have been colonized from the north, rather than by the Dutch and British from the south. Parts of East Africa were a source of slaves and ivory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The trading routes, commanded by Arab and Swahili African networks, as well as Afro-Portuguese further south, were linked with the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, slave-holding expanded within enclaves of East Africa, such as the clove plantations of Zanzibar. When Britain attempted to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and policed the West African coast, East and Central African sources briefly became more important for the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves from these areas were taken to Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Britain did not have the same intensity of contact with East Africa as with West and southern Africa until the late nineteenth century. There was no major natural resource that commanded a market in Europe and British traders had limited involvement in these slave markets. But between the 1880s and 1910s, most of East and Central Africa was taken under colonial rule, sometimes initially as protectorates: by Britain in Kenya and Uganda; Germany in Tanzania; Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi; and by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo.
Oil Extraction in the Middle East: The Kuwait Experience
Authors: Beinart William , Hughes Lotte
Published: November 2020

Oil has been the lubricant of international relations and industry since the turn of the twentieth century. The fabulous wealth it has generated for a clutch of individuals, states, and corporations has skewed global politics, fed human greed, fuelled conflict, and brought as much destruction as delight in its wake. The struggle for access to and control over oil was central to the final stages of imperial expansion, and the Middle East saw a regional equivalent of the ‘scramble for Africa’. European powers sought to carve up the area as the twentieth century turned, their eyes fixed on oil as the main prize. Central to our argument is that empire followed natural resources, in unpredictable ways. It created commodity frontiers that had enormous implications for routes of expansion and relations with local societies. The future of the Middle East, then under the sway of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, was already of great concern to Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. But oil provided a new urgency, and shaped patterns of intervention; the history of the Middle East over the next century would have been profoundly different without it. Although capital became more mobile from the late nineteenth century, some of the most valuable natural resources in the twentieth-century Empire proved to be rooted to specific regions. In this sense, oil as a natural resource shaped the geography of empire, as had fur and forests before it. But the specific character of oil and of imperialism in the region (our focus is on Kuwait), resulted in rather different outcomes for local societies than those experienced on some other earlier commodity frontiers. Although the oil companies were largely foreign-owned, Middle Eastern people were, to a much greater degree, beneficiaries of resource extraction. In this respect, there are parallels with Malaysia. An important concern in this chapter is to chart the impact of oil on Bedouin pastoralists in Kuwait, their use of the desert, and its environmental implications. We also explore briefly other environmental impacts of oil exploitation. These are issues less frequently rehearsed than the political and economic consequences. The energy needs of the metropolitan world led to increasing demands for oil as the twentieth century advanced.