Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes

Student and Singer

Sir Charles Santley (1834–1922), bariton Inggris yang kariernya membentang lebih dari lima puluh tahun, merangkul tahap-tahap opera dan konser, termasuk di antara penyanyi paling terkenal di generasinya. Setelah belajar di Italia, ia kembali ke Inggris, di mana ia segera diminati di panggung konser dan peran opera, bernyanyi bersama perusahaan opera Pyne-Harrison, Mapleson dan Carl Rosa, Sacred Harmonic Society, Philharmonic Society, dan di festival musik utama Inggris. Namanya terkait erat dengan festival Handel yang mewah di Crystal Palace. Memoar Santley, yang pertama kali diterbitkan pada tahun 1892 dan diterbitkan kembali di sini pada edisi ketiga tahun itu, berkonsentrasi hampir secara eksklusif pada karier opiatnya (volume lebih lanjut tentang pengalaman konsernya telah direncanakan). Anekdotnya yang ramah dan informatif mendukung pesan utama bahwa kerja keras dan ketekunan memenangkan har

Ranchoapan: The "New Obsidian" City of the Tuxtlas?

The origin of cities is a subject of major interest to geographers, economic historians, and archaeologists. One view of their development stipulates that cities are built on a rural economic base. In other words, the process is from the bottom up, with centers ultimately emerging to provide a variety of goods and services to a population of rural consumers distributed around them. An alternative view is that the development was from the top down. Centers emerged for any num~er of social and political, but once present nascient craft specialists manipulated the economic environment, making the rural countryside increasingly dependent on their goods. This paper utilizes information from the Tuxtla Mountains in southern Veracruz, Meiico, as a basis for looking at early city development. In particular, evidence on obsidian working from the archaeological site of Ranchoapan is applied to evaluate the "countryside first" and "city first" hypotheses. In the Tuxtlas Region it appears that the specialized obsidian working arose from a substratum involving the generalized manufacture of tools by households situated at small sites. The countryside first hypothesis thus has greater explanatory utility in the Tuxtlas than its conceptual alternative. Other crafts such as ceramics production, however, show a better fit to the city first model.The Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexic