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2 results

  • 3 - Early States and Civilizations

  • from Part II - The State We’re in and How We Got There
  • Bert J. M. de Vries, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Sustainability Science
    Published online:
    07 December 2023
    Print publication:
    07 December 2023, pp 39-65

  • Summary

    To understand the human predicament in the Anthropocene, it is helpful to investigate the rise, maintenance and fall of social complexity in the past. Tribal communities, early states and large empires have all been confronted with extra-human, inter-human and intra-human dynamic processes. Local and regional biogeography often played a major role (resources, threats), but in combination with technical and organizational skills and sociopolitical and cultural (elite) behaviour. Reconstructions of ancient civilzations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, Rome, China and others) suggest the mechanisms and contingencies in societal growth, expansion and decline. One feature is the capability to collect and interpret long-term changes or lack thereof.

  • 19 - The Pleistocene colonization and occupation of the Americas

  • from Part II - The Paleolithic and the beginnings of human history
  • Edited by David Christian, Macquarie University, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    09 April 2015, pp 461-476

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the peculiar bond between humans and fire: what, in the course of history, have we humans done with fire, and what has fire done to us. Four successive phases in human history are distinguished: the phase before domestication; the phase of domestication of fire; the phase that in analogy with the subsequent phase of industrialization may be called agrarianization; and industrialization. A new phase (fifth phase), in which fire and fuel will play a very different role than in the still current phase of industrialization, is discussed. The history of the human bond with fire and fuel has aspects that relate to practically all academic disciplines, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Fire is a process of combustion of organic matter. A momentary conjunction of three conditions, Matter, Energy, and Information (MEI), is needed for it to occur.