Plants And Culture History A Review Of Carter G F

This book is one of a series of more than 20 volumes resulting from the World Archaeological Congress, September 1986, attempting to bring together not only archaeologists and anthropologists from many parts of the world, as well as academics from contingent disciplines, but also non-academics from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. This volume develops a new approach to plant exploitation and early agriculture in a worldwide comparative context. It modifies the conceptual dichotomy between "hunter-gatherers" and "farmers", viewing human exploitation of plant resources as a global evolutionary process which incorporated the beginnings of cultivation and crop domestication. The studies throughout the book come from a worldwide range of geographical contexts, from the Andes to China and from Australia to the Upper Mid-West of North America. This work is of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists and geographers. Originally published 1989.

From the introduction to the new edition: “I’ll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue.” —Charles Bowden In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity’s relationship with the land. Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, “What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down,” Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey’s words, “the best all-around summary I’ve read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere.”

The period following the second world war has witnessed an expanding commitment to incr~ased food production in tropical countries. Public and private initiatives at the national and international levels have led to the creation of programs geared specifically towards the improvement of food crops in tropical conditions. Examples of this increased commitment are the network of international agricultural research centers and numerous bilateral aid projects. As a consequence, crop improvement has become a truly worldwide endeavor, relying on an international network of institutions and collaborators. This holds also for Phaseolus beans. Following the discovery of the Americas, Phaseolus beans became distributed on all six continents. Yet, until not so long ago, most of the research on Phaseolus improvement took place in developed countries. In recognition of the nutritional importance of Phaseolus beans in developing countries, this has changed considerably in the last years, principally perhaps through the activities of the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) and the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR). Consequently, the scope of the research on Phaseolus has broadened considerably and the number of Phaseolus researchers is larger than ever before.