Natural World Hero Image
Natural World
Experimentation and Reconstruction in Environmental Archaeology Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 278
ISBN: 9780946897230
Pub Date: 31 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: figs and photos. ISBN 0 946897 22 0. Pb
Description:
Eighteen papers and six abstracts from the ninth symposium of the Association of Environmental Archaeology held at Roskilde, Denmark, in 1988.
Butterflies of Pennsylvania Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822964551
Pub Date: 25 May 2017
Description:
How do you tell a Striped Hairstreak butterfly from a Regal Fritillary butterfly? By using Butterflies of Pennsylvania, the most comprehensive, user-friendly field guide to date of all of the species ever recorded within Pennsylvania's 46,056 square miles. Over 900 brilliant color photographs illustrate both the upper and under side of male and female specimens of each species, including skippers.
Engineering the Environment Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822944744
Pub Date: 10 May 2017
Description:
Promising an end to global hunger and political instability, huge climate-controlled laboratories known as phytotrons spread around the world to thirty countries after the Second World War. The United States built nearly a dozen, including the first at Caltech in 1949. Made possible by computers and other novel greenhouse technologies of the early Cold War, phytotrons enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms.
Kentucky Heirloom Seeds Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780813168876
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2017
Illustrations: 20 color photos, 66 b/w photos
Description:
Saving seeds to plant for next year's crop has been key to survival around the globe for millennia. However, the twentieth century witnessed a grand takeover of seed producers by multinational companies aiming to select varieties ideal for mechanical harvest, long-distance transportation, and long shelf life. With the rise of the Slow Food and farm-to-table movements in recent years, the farmers and home gardeners who have been quietly persisting in the age-old habit of conserving heirloom plants are finally receiving credit for their vital role in preserving both good taste and the world's rich food heritage.
Imagined Empire, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 472
ISBN: 9780822944652
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2017
Description:
The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together.
Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780822944584
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2017
Description:
Can we expect our scientific theories to make up a unified structure, or do they form a kind of "patchwork" whose pieces remain independent from each other? Does the proliferation of sometimes-incompatible representations of the same phenomenon compromise the ability of science to deliver reliable knowledge? Is there a single correct way to classify things that science should try to discover, or is taxonomic pluralism here to stay?
Life Organic, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822944669
Pub Date: 13 Jan 2017
Description:
As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a "vital spark," and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik Peterson tells the forgotten story of the pursuit of a Third Way in biology, known by many names, including "the organic philosophy," which gave rise to C. H.
Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910 Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822964766
Pub Date: 16 Dec 2016
Description:
From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will—if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human agency and self-improvement? Smith takes an in-depth look at the problem of free will through the prism of different disciplines.
Snails Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9781785705144
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2016
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Description:
The remains of snails in ancient soils and sediments are one of the most important biological indicators of past landscapes, and have attracted study for well over a century. In spite of this, the only English-language textbook was published in 1972 and is long since out of print. Snails provides a comprehensive, up to date reference text on the use of snails as indicators of past environments in Quaternary landscape studies and archaeology.
The Ancient Yew Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9781785700781
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2016
Imprint: Windgather Press
Description:
The gnarled, immutable yew tree is one of the most evocative sights in the British and Irish language, an evergreen impression of immortality, the tree that provides a living botanical link between our own landscapes and those of the distant past. This book tells the extraordinary story of the yew’s role in the landscape through the millennia, and makes a convincing case for the origins of many of the oldest trees, as markers of the holy places founded by Celtic saints in the early medieval ‘Dark Ages’.With wonderful photographic portraits of ancient yews and a gazetteer (with locations) of the oldest yew trees in Britain, the book brings together for the first time all the evidence about the dating, history, archaeology and cultural connections of the yew.
Field Life Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 464
ISBN: 9780822944539
Pub Date: 25 Nov 2016
Description:
Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded. Four distinct modes of field practice, which were shared by different field science disciplines, proliferated during this period—surveys, lay networks, quarries, and stations—and this book explores the dynamics that underpinned each of them.
Communicating Physics Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822964728
Pub Date: 18 Nov 2016
Description:
The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot's books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence as far as North America, Australia, India and Japan.Simon's Franco-British case study looks at the role of Ganot's two textbooks: Traite elementaire de physique experimentale et appliquee (1851) and Cours de physique purement experimentale (1859), and their translations into English by Edmund Atkinson.
Archaeomalacology Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9781785704598
Pub Date: 15 Oct 2016
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Proceedings of the 9th ICAZ Conference
Description:
Molluscs are the most common invertebrate remains found at archaeological sites, but archaeomalacology (the study of molluscs in archaeological contexts) is a relatively new archaeological discipline and the field of zooarchaeology is seen by many as one mainly focused on the remains of vertebrates. The papers in this volume hope to redress this balance, bringing molluscan studies into mainstream zooarchaeological and archaeological debate, and resulting in a monograph with a truly international flavour.
Shades of Green Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 375
ISBN: 9781909686779
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2016
Imprint: Windgather Press
Description:
Sitka spruce has contributed to the Pacific Coast landscapes of North America for over ten millennia. For the Tlingit First Nationit is the most important tree in terms of spiritual relationships, art, and products in daily use such as canoes, containers, fish-traps and sweet cakes. Since the late nineteenth century it has also been the most important tree to the timber industry of west coast North America.
Japan after 3/11 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 496
ISBN: 9780813167305
Pub Date: 27 Sep 2016
Illustrations: 61 b&w photos, 77 maps, 12 figures, 34 tables
Description:
On March 11, 2011, an underwater earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, Japan, triggered one of the most devastating tsunamis of a generation. The aftermath was overwhelming: communities were reduced to rubble, thousands of people were missing or dead, and relief organizations struggled to reach affected areas to provide aid for survivors and victims of radiation from compromised nuclear reactors.In Japan after 3/11, editors Pradyumna P.
Medicine and Modernism Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822964360
Pub Date: 16 Sep 2016
Description:
This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon.