The papers in this book were first presented at the Association for Environmental Archaeology conference at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1998. The aim of the original conference was to encourage contributors to examine the inter-relationships between classes of data that have increasingly come to be treated in isolation and to encourage thinking about theory in environmental archaeology. The papers go some way to achieving these aims; some focus on explicit developments of theory, others on bridging barriers between different fields of study of classes of evidence, while others are case studies with an ecodynamic component.
Part 1 Theoretical perspectives: contemporary human ecodynamics and the mathematics of history, Nick Winder; on the complex nature of microbial ecodynamics in relation to earlier human palaeoecology, Don Brothwell; human refuse as a major ecological factor in mediaeval urban vertebrate communities, Terry O'Connor; settlement and territory - a socio-scological approach to the evolution of settlement systems, John Bintliff. Part 2 Environmental interactions: tectonics, volcanism, landscape structure and human evolution in the African rift, Geoff Baily et al; Bronze Age human ecodynamics in the Humber Estuary, Robert van de Noort and William Fletcher; refuting the land degradation myth for Boeotia, Robert Shiel; sorting dross from data - possible indicators of post-depositional assemblage biasing in archaeological palynology, M. Jane Bunting and Richard Tipping; late Holocene fluctuations in the composition of Montane Forest in the Rukiga Highlands, Central Africa, Robert Marchant et al. Part 3 The exploitation of plants and animals: beaver territories - the resource potential for humans, Bryony Coles; later Stone Age hunter-gatherer adaptations in the Lesotho Highlands, Southern Africa, Peter Mitchell and Ruth Charles; the aquatic basis of ancient civilizations - the case study of "Synodontis schall" and the Nile Valley, Rosemary Luff and Geoff Bailey; Danebury environs - agricultural change in the Iron Age, Gill Campbell and Julie Hamilton. Part 4 Health, pathology and disease: palaopathology and horse domestication - the case of some Iron Age horses from the Altai Mountains, Siberia, Marsha Levine et al; an evaluation of the possible use of nitrogen isotopes to detect milking in cattle, Andrew Millard; human skeletal remains - putting the humans back into human ecodynamics, Megan Brickley.