/pdf/urban-agriculture-food-jobs-and-sustainable-cities-99p4t7fk9t.pdf

Urban Agriculture Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities

This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based, species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. These structures are routine products of our "habits of mind," which may in part be naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent "habits of the world." An experiment illustrates that the same taxonomic rank is preferred for making biological inferences in two diverse populations: Lowland Maya and Midwest Americans. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. This supports a modular view of folk biology as a core domain of human knowledge and as a special player, or "core meme," in the selection processes by which cultures evolve. Structural aspects of folk taxonomy provide people in different cultures with the built-in constraints and flexibility that allow them to understand and respond appropriately to different cultural and ecological settings. Another set of reasoning experiments shows that Maya, American folk, and scientists use similarly structured taxonomies in somewhat different ways to extend their understanding of the world in the face of uncertainty. Although folk and scientific taxonomies diverge historically, they continue to interact. The theory of evolution may ultimately dispense with the core concepts of folk biology, including species, taxonomy, and teleology; in practice, however, these may remain indispensable to doing scientific work. Moreover, theory-driven scientific knowledge cannot simply replace folk knowledge in everyday life. Folk-biological knowledge is not driven by implicit or inchoate theories of the sort science aims to make more accurate and perfect.

Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars

This book offers the first detailed comparative study of the seven best-documented early civilizations: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Aztecs and adjacent peoples in the Valley of Mexico, the Classic Maya, the Inka, and the Yoruba. Unlike previous studies, equal attention is paid to similarities and differences in their sociopolitical organization, economic systems, religion, and culture. Many of this study's findings are surprising and provocative. Agricultural systems, technologies, and economic behaviour turn out to have been far more diverse than was expected. These findings and many others challenge not only current understandings of early civilizations but also the theoretical foundations of modern archaeology and anthropology. The key to understanding early civilizations lies not in their historical connections but in what they can tell us about similarities and differences in human behaviour.

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam034/2002074052.pdf

Understanding early civilizations : a comparative study

Human populations and their use of land have transformed most of the terrestrial biosphere into anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), causing a variety of novel ecological patterns and processes to emerge. To assess whether human populations and their use of land have directly altered the terrestrial biosphere sufficiently to indicate that the Earth system has entered a new geological epoch, spatially explicit global estimates of human populations and their use of land were analysed across the Holocene for their potential to induce irreversible novel transformation of the terrestrial biosphere. Human alteration of the terrestrial biosphere has been significant for more than 8000 years. However, only in the past century has the majority of the terrestrial biosphere been transformed into intensively used anthromes with predominantly novel anthropogenic ecological processes. At present, even were human populations to decline substantially or use of land become far more efficient, the current global extent, duration, type and intensity of human transformation of ecosystems have already irreversibly altered the terrestrial biosphere at levels sufficient to leave an unambiguous geological record differing substantially from that of the Holocene or any prior epoch. It remains to be seen whether the anthropogenic biosphere will be sustained and continue to evolve.

Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere

The role of climate change in the development and demise of Classic Maya civilization (300 to 1000 C.E.) remains controversial because of the absence of well-dated climate and archaeological sequences. We present a precisely dated subannual climate record for the past 2000 years from Yok Balum Cave, Belize. From comparison of this record with historical events compiled from well-dated stone monuments, we propose that anomalously high rainfall favored unprecedented population expansion and the proliferation of political centers between 440 and 660 C.E. This was followed by a drying trend between 660 and 1000 C.E. that triggered the balkanization of polities, increased warfare, and the asynchronous disintegration of polities, followed by population collapse in the context of an extended drought between 1020 and 1100 C.E.

/pdf/development-and-disintegration-of-maya-political-systems-in-1kr9eoir88.pdf

Development and Disintegration of Maya Political Systems in Response to Climate Change

Archaeological interpretation of ancient civilizations is characterized by periods of stasis and times of rapid change. While archaeologists can easily segment phases of material culture into sequent units, the points of transformation between these units are difficult to define archaeologically. The combined rapidity and lack of uniformity that can be associated with transitions makes it more difficult to model and to interpret cause and effect. Yet, these material shifts are precisely the most interesting part of the archaeological quest for knowledge. In the Maya area, times of transition fall at the beginning and end of each of the major recognized units of time. Thus, while the Preclassic, Classic, Postclassic, and Historic Periods can all be readily documented and explicated, what happened in the interstices between these periods foments differences of opinion. Recognizing the theoretical issues associated with the frameworks that are imposed onto our archaeological databases helps with making interpretations about the sequence of transformations that define Maya civilization. This paper looks first at transitions within the archaeological record of the Maya and then attempts to contextualize these pivotal timeframes.

Transitions and transformations in ancient civilizations: interpreting change and realignment between temporal periods in the maya archaeological record

The Southern Lowlands

Virtual drama is based on the use of a shareable virtual world as a stage setting, with avatars controlled by actors and audience members. In this experiment, students built a virtual world to teach concepts of Mesoamerican archaeology and the cultural history of the ancient Maya.

Virtual drama as a learning medium: the Caracol Time Travel project

Interpreting Ancient Maya Society Through Residential Groups: Investigating Early Long-Distance Interaction in Caracol's Epicenter: Caracol Archaeological Project Investigations for 2017

In her book Maya Cultural Heritage: How Archaeologists and Indigenous Communities Engage the Past (Roman and Littlefield 2016), Patricia McAnany urges archaeologists who work in the Maya region (i [...]

Leaving the Quiet Jungle Path: Introduction to Maya Anthropological Archaeology

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