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This book highlights climate as a complex physical, chemical, biological, and geological system, in perpetual change, under astronomical, predominantly, solar control. It has been shaped to some degree through the past glaciation cycles repeated in the last three million years. The Holocene, the current interglacial epoch which started ca. 11,700 years ago, marks the transition from the Stone Age to the unprecedented cultural evolution of our civilization. Significant climate changes have been recorded in natural archives during the Holocene, including the rapid waning of ice sheets, millennial shifting of the monsoonal fringe in the northern hemisphere, and abrupt centennial events. A typic...
This book presents the major engineering achievements in underground aqueducts from around the world and throughout history. It provides valuable insights into water technologies and management with respect to durability, adaptability to the environment, and sustainability. Comparisons of the technological underground aqueduct developments from several regions are made. These technologies are the underpinning of modern achievements in water supply engineering and water management practices, and current issues of sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and decentralization have led engineers to consider combining older proven technologies with modern infrastructure advancements.
This volume is the first presentation of large scale waterworks in the Greek provinces of the Roman Empire. As a collective work, it brings together a wide body of experts from the newly emerged and expanding field of water technology and water archaeology in Roman Greece, and it fills an essential gap in archaeological research.
The first comparative study to explore the dynamics of expansion and contraction of major continental empires in Eurasia.
This book is a sister volume to Volume 20 of the Handbook of Environmental Engineering Series, "Integrated Natural Resources Management", and expands on the themes of that volume by addressing the conservation and protection of natural resources in an environmental engineering context through state-of-the-art research methodologies and technologies. With a focus on water and wastewater treatment, the book takes a multidisciplinary approach to provide readers with an understanding of developments in natural resources technology over the last few decades, and how technology and industry methods will progress to ensure cleaner and sustainable methods of natural resources management. The key top...
This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.
This book explores the subsistence strategies that ancient Mesoamericans implemented to survive and thrive in their environments. It discusses the natural settings, production sites, techniques, artifacts, cultural landscapes, traditional knowledge, and other features linked to human subsistence in aquatic environments.
Qanats are ubiquitous, yet unseen, and a clever way to create streams where none exist in nature. For 3,000 years, they have made life possible in impossible places and still sustain life and livelihoods in many countries today. After 30 years of field research, Dale Lightfoot provides the first comprehensive study of the qanat and sheds new light on their unique locations and distribution, their origins and history, their ecology, current status and use. Qanats are remarkably engineered underground aqueducts, using gravity to bring water to villages and towns where reliable flowing surface water is scarce or absent. Although an ancient technology, more than 46,000 of them still flow around the world today, with their sustainable nature making them a focus of renewed interest. Richly illustrated with images and a series of original maps, this is the most complete record to date of the locations and distribution of qanats worldwide, including examples from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Central Asia, China, India, Mexico and South America.
Twenty-five papers presented at the December 1996 symposium held in Athens to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American School of Classical Studies excavations at ancient Corinth. The papers are intended to illustrate the range in subject matter of research currently being undertaken by scholars of ancient Corinth, and their inclusion in one volume will serve as a useful reference work for nonspecialists. Each of the topics (which vary widely from Corinthian geology to religious practices to Byzantine pottery) is presented by the acknowledged expert in that area. The book includes a full general bibliography of articles and volumes concerning material excavated at Corinth. As a summary of one hundred years' research it will be useful to generations of scholars to come.
As the world is gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, all eyes in the UK have been on our NHS heroes. But where did they come from? Why do we have such a unique free at the point of use healthcare system? How has this benefitted British society? And how does healthcare in other countries work? Going back to pre-history, we will take a look at epidemics and pandemics through the ages and how they have consistently nudged healthcare policy toward a more social model. They say a measure of civilised society is how it provides for its citizens, and the NHS has been the backbone of Great Britain for the best part of a century. As well as looking at its origins and counterparts in other countries, we will take a look at how the Covid-19 pandemic has been handled, and what the future of social healthcare might be across the globe.