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Megadrought and Collapse - From Early Agriculture to Angkor (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,518
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Megadrought and Collapse - From Early Agriculture to Angkor (Hardcover)
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Megadrought and Collapse is the first book to treat in one volume
the current paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence of
megadrought events coincident with major historical examples of
societal collapse. Previous works have offered multi-causal
explanations for climate change, from overpopulation,
overexploitation of resources, and warfare to poor leadership and
failure to adapt to environmental changes. In earlier synthetic
studies of major instances of collapse, the archaeological record
has often not been considered. Included in this volume are nine
case studies that span the globe and stretch over fourteen thousand
years, from the paleolithic hunter-gatherer collapse of the 12th
millennium BC to the 15th century AD fall of the Khmer capital at
Angkor. Together, the studies constitute a primary sourcebook in
which principal investigators in archaeology and paleoclimatology
present their original research. Each case study juxtaposes the
latest paleoclimatic evidence of a megadrought (so-called for its
severity and its decades to centuries-long duration) with available
archaeological records of synchronous societal collapse. The
megadrought data are derived from all five archival paleoclimate
proxy sources: lake, marine, and glacial cores, speleothems (cave
stalagmites), and tree rings. The archaeological records in each
case are the most recently retrieved. The editor derives two
arguments from the discussions in the volume: (1) Societal collapse
would not have occurred without megadrought. Attendant social
disruptions may have been present in some instances. Nonetheless,
megadrought rendered agriculture-based societies unsustainable in
different regions, periods, and levels of social complexity, from
simple foraging to vast empires. (2) A set of adaptive responses
can be observed across the nine cases: adaptive collapse in the
face of insurmountable megadrought, region-wide and settlement
abandonment, and habitat tracking to sustainable agricultural
environments. The evidence points to a paradigm shift: the
insertion of another major force, natural climate
variability-megadrought-into the global historical record.
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