The Middle Holocene epoch (8,000 to 3,000 years ago) was a time of dramatic changes in the physical world and in human cultures. Across this span, climatic conditions changed rapidly, with cooling in the high to mid-latitudes and drying in the tropics. In many parts of the world, human groups became more complex, with early horticultural systems replaced by intensive agriculture and small-scale societies being replaced by larger, more hierarchial organizations. Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics explores the cause and effect relationship between climatic change and cultural transformations across the mid-Holocene (c. 4000 B.C.).
* Explores the role of climatic change on the development of society around the world
* Chapters detail diverse geographical regions
* Co-written by noted archaeologists and paleoclimatologists for non-specialists

Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume OCo all noted scholars in their region OCo have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight yearsOCO work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communitiesOCO contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy."

"This is an excellent collection of articles. . . . All are clearly written and any of them could be used in undergraduate teaching. Moreover, the range of case studies is impressively global. . . . The articles all exhibit a good capacity to provoke. . . . The result is an enjoyable book that is likely to be useful to teachers, students and practitioners of environmentalism." - Anthropological Forum Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate. David G. Anderson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Eeva Berglund was Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College from 1998 to 2002 and has written on the anthropology and history of environmental politics.

In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild animals that support them. Although divided for most of the 20th Century by various national trading blocks, and the Cold War, aboriginal people in each region share common stories about the various capitalist and socialist states that claimed control over their lands and animals. Now, aboriginal peoples throughout the region are reclaiming their rights. This volume is the first to give a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, as well as addressing the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region.

Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

David G. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology and Chair in Anthropology of the North at the University of Aberdeen. He was the leader of the collaborative research project entitled BOREAS Homes, Hearths and Households in the Circumpolar North and is presently the PI of an ERC-funded advanced grant entitled Arctic Domestication: Emplacing Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North. He is the author of a monograph on Taimyr Evenkis and Dolgans, and the editor or co-editor of several collections published by Berghahn Books, most recently, "The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions" (2011).

Robert P. Wishart is Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. his ethnographic work has been on the Gwich'in-Dene of the Mackenzie Delta in Northern Canada, with the Ojibwe of Ontario, and with Scottish fishers. He led an associated project on vernacular architecture in the Gwich'in settlement area for the HHH research consortium.

Virginie Vate is an anthropologist and a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. Since 1994, she has been doing research in Chukotka (Northeastern Siberia) and, since 2011, in Alaska. Within the ESF/BOREAS collaborative framework, she led an associated project on conversion to Christianity in Chukotka for the research program NEWREL (New Religious Movements in the Russian North). She is a co-editor of the NEWREL volume, currently in preparation.

"This a much-welcome addition to the modern English-language reference library on Siberian indigenous people and the first book-size effort to address their plight and status from the perspective of the Russian archival statistical and documentary records of the early 1900s. It is an outcome of a monumental collaborative project." . Igor Krupnik, Smithsonian Institution

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume - all noted scholars in their region - have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years' work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communities' contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy."

"The edited work contains one of the most interesting sets of northern papers to appear in a very long time . . . each paper is excellent . . . this book will hopefully provoke considerable thought. . . . This is a work that should be discussed in terms of the particulars of the various papers, but also for the overview it provides." - Polar Record In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild animals that support them. Although divided for most of the 20th Century by various national trading blocks, and the Cold War, aboriginal people in each region share common stories about the various capitalist and socialist states that claimed control over their lands and animals. Now, aboriginal peoples throughout the region are reclaiming their rights. This volume is the first to give a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, as well as addressing the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region. David G. Anderson is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Mark Nuttall is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.

This is a first-hand account of a reindeer-herding collective in the remote Taimyr peninsula of Siberia. The author gives an intimate description of the day-to-day lives of a little-known group of Evenkis as they face both economic and ecological challenges. His study addresses questions of identity, nationalism, and ecological theory, as well as mapping the changes caused in the region by the formation of and the recent break-up of the Soviet Union.

From the foreword:
"With this important volume, the editors serve notice that old characterizations of the cultures of the Archaic period have been buried under the back dirt of new excavations and new interpretations. . . . It places the Archaic cultures squarely at the forefront of archaeological theory."

This volume summarizes our archaeological knowledge of natives who inhabited the American Southeast from 8,000 to 3,000 years ago and examines evidence of many of the native cultural expressions observed by early European explorers, including long-distance exchange, plant domestication, mound building, social ranking, and warfare.

Contents
Section I. Mid-Holocene Environments

1. Geoarchaeology and the Mid-Holocene Landscape History of the Greater Southeast, by Joseph Schuldenrein

2. Mid-Holocene Forest History of Florida and the Coastal Plain of Georgia and South Carolina, by William A. Watts, Eric C. Grimm, and T. C. Hussey

Section II. Technology

3. Changing Strategies of Lithic Technological Organization, by Daniel S. Amick and Philip J. Carr

4. Technological Innovations in Economic and Social Contexts, by Kenneth E. Sassaman

5. Middle and Late Archaic Architecture, by Kenneth E. Sassaman and R. Jerald Ledbetter

Section III. Subsistence and Health

6. The Paleoethnobotanical Record for the Mid-Holocene Southeast, by Kristen J. Gremillion

7. Mid-Holocene Faunal Exploitation in the Southeastern United States, by Bonnie W. Styles and Walter E. Klippel

8. Biocultural Inquiry into Archaic Period Populations of the Southeast: Trauma and Occupational Stress, by Maria O. Smith

Section IV. Regional Settlement Variation

9. Approaches to Modeling Regional Settlement in the Archaic Period Southeast, by David G. Anderson

10. Southeastern Mid-Holocene Coastal Settlements, by Michael Russo

11. Accounting for Submerged Mid-Holocene Archaeological Sites in the Southeast: A Case Study from the Chesapeake Bay Estuary, Virginia, by Dennis B. Blanton

Section V. Regional Integration and Organization

12. The Emergence of Long-Distance Exchange Networks in the Southeastern United States, by Richard W. Jefferies

13. A Consideration of the Social Organization of the Shell Mound Archaic, by Cheryl P. Claassen

14. Southeastern Archaic Mounds, by Michael Russo

15. Poverty Point and Greater Southeastern Prehistory: The Culture That Did Not Fit, by Jon L. Gibson

Kenneth E. Sassaman is archaeologist with the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and instructor in the Department of History and Anthropology at Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia. He is the author of "Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology." David G. Anderson is archaeologist with the Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service, Tallahassee, Florida. He is the author of "The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast." They are coeditors of "The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast."

This volume documents healing traditions in Eastern Siberia in an area extending from Lake Baikal to the Arctic Ocean. The region shows an interesting unity in healing traditions across a wide range of landscape types and culture areas: from the taiga-steppe borderlands influenced by Tibetan and Russian practices in the south, to the north where regional shamanic traditions prevail. There are broad similarities in using unrefined natural materials for healing, as well as in a concern over the 'spiritual' foundations of health, with an accent upon the land as an important dimension. Due to this diversity, this region provides a strong point of comparison to ecologies in other parts of the circumpolar North. The chapters document a blossoming of autonomous healing traditions in post-Soviet Siberia resulting from a social crisis in the aftermath of the collapse of the previous centralized health system. It is a type of 'medical pluralism' marked by a popularity of alternate, non-clinical treatments. But, the sudden upsurge in autonomous cures also speaks to the silent survival of these knowledge traditions in a context where the official medical practice dominated the public sphere for seventy years.

This work documents the lives of a group of hunters and reindeer herders living at the headwaters of the Lower Tunguska River at the end of the 20th century. Katanga Evenkis are best described by the flexible and creative way they use the land around them, and continue to exercise a strong presence on their lands, despite severe pressure by Soviet-era policies and even more devastating dislocations by industrial development and privatisation. According to Sirina, Katanga Evenkis at the end of the 20th century are best characterized not by what they have lost but instead by the way they continue to make a home for themselves in the taiga, using a variety of adaptive strategies and intuitions that reflect what she calls the 'outlook of a mobile people.'