Archaeological evidence demonstrates that prehistoric human activities caused significant environmental alteration in many parts of the region…
The authors assert that potash production in northern Sweden lost out to German producers, who started to produce potash industrially at the same time that production in northern Sweden ceased. The ecological significance of the potash production is difficult to estimate…
This paper suggests an approach for using different types of data sources, and for bringing together understandings of ecosystem dynamics and of people’s interaction with the environment, and thereby achieving ‘closure’ in a highly contested terrain.
Sacred groves in the ancient Mediterranean are compared with surviving groves of South India, particularly Uttara Kannada, to evaluate the roles of these refugia in maintaining balance between human groups and the ecosystems of which they are part.
With this issue of Environment and History, van Dam contributes to the thesis that the expansion of trade systems and the emergence of large-scale human intervention in (formerly) natural ecosystems is a continuous, interactive process with a long history, long before the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of the New Worlds.
The optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment multiplied initiatives designed to secure and improve the milieus within which Europeans earned a precarious living, notably through greater control of hydraulic resources…
The author’s own research into the early years of European settlement plots an evolving cultural engagement with the indigenous environment, and in particular with forest or ‘bush,’ which ran parallel with its extensive replacement by agroecosystems.
The aim of this study was to analyse the swift land-use transition, from nomadic to agricultural, in the last colonised landscape of northern Sweden. Using historical documents and maps together with modern maps and a field survey, the authors wanted to link land-use patterns as strongly as possible to landscape features and ecosystems.
Daley and Griggs present documentary and oral history evidence to show that the extent and severity of mining in the Great Barrier Reef has been hitherto neglected in environmental histories of the ecosystem.
This paper examines the history of hard rock mining on the large lakes of north-west Canada (Athabasca, Great Slave and Great Bear) from 1921 to 1960.
