Mr. Rick Davis
Bryn Mawr College

Office Hours: Wed 10-12; Thur 1 – 2 / Dalton 100b

Texts

Dahl, Jens
    2000     Saqqaq: An Inuit Hunting Community in the Modern World.
                 Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Kurlansky, Mark
    1997    Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. New York:Walker and Company.

Moran, Emilio F.
    2000     Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology.
                 2^nd Edition. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Redman, Charles L.
    1999     Human Impact on Ancient Environments. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press

Requirements

Completion of Lab exercises (20%) , Midterm (20%), Project (30%), and Final (30%). The Midterm will be on March 7th, the Project is due on April 30th, and the Final will be self-scheduled.

Course Description

Human ecology is the study of human populations in their environmental contexts. It is basically a systemic approach that focuses on interactions and transformations between cultures and their environments. In what ways do cultures and environments shape each other? After reviewing some fundamentals of ecology and the place ecology has found in the development of anthropology, we will proceed to investigate a number of topics with the aid of case studies, labs, texts and articles. The topics will include extractive industries and resource depletion, human impacts on ancient environments, basic patterns of human adaptations within Holocene biomes, cognitive models of the environment, computer simulations of ecosystems, effects of climatic variation, population growth and resource distribution, and sustainability (forests and fishes). The course is intended to give an introduction to ecological anthropology and to build the basis for understanding past and present human populations in their environments.

Meetings and Schedule of Reading
 
 
 

	Week of	Tuesday	Thursday	Readings
1	January 22	Introduction	Codfish, Ecology & Anthropology	Kurlansky Vitousek, et al. 1997 Moran 1-2
2	January 29	Cod	Cod	Kurlansky
3	February 5	History of Human Ecology and Anthropology	Fundamentals of Ecology and Evolution	Moran 3-4 Redman 1-2 Pauly et al. 2000 fig3 fig 5
4	February 12		Longterm Environmental Perspectives	Redman 4 IPCC report
5	February 19	Impact of Agriculture Lab 1 due	Early Urban Impacts	Redman 5-6
6	February 26	Human Population Patterns		The State of World Population - UN 1999 (Chapters 1-3)
7	March 5	Population ecology Lab 2 due	Midterm
8	March 19	Bryn Mawr Local Ecology Earliest Peoples of the Bering Sea	Northern Hunters: Aleut Ecology Past and Present Arctic Ecology & Adaptation	Freeman, Lantis ,  Moran 5 Fish and Forest
9	March 26	Ecological Ethnography: Saqqaq	Film:  Nanook of the North	Dahl
10	April 2	Grass Lands, Herders & Farmers	Film:  Grass	Moran 7-8
11	April 9	Humid Tropical Human Ecology		Moran 9
12	April 16	Tragedy of Commons Garbology	Tragedy of Commons	Rathje 1974 Rathje 1992 Hardin 1968 McCay & Acheson Smith & Wishne 2000
13	April 23	Sustainability and Land Use: The Chugach National Forest	Riverbend Fieldtrip	Chugach Forest Plan
14	April 30	Project Presentations	Project Presentations	Moran 10

 

Reserved Readings (In Dalton 104 and the Course Web Page)

Freeman, Milton M.R.
   1984     Arctic Ecosystems. In David Damas, ed., Handbook of Northern American
                Indians, Vol. 5, Arctic, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington,D.C., pp. 36 - 48.

Hardin, Garrett
 1968 The Tragedy of Commons. Science 162: 1243-1248.

Lantis, Margaret
   1984     Aleut. In David Damas, ed., Handbook of Northern American Indians,
                Vol. 5, Arctic, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington,D.C., pp. 161 - 184.

Pauly, Daniel et al.
    2000    Fishing Down Aquatic Food Webs.  American Scientist 88:46-51.

Smith, Eric A. and Mark Wishnie
    2000     Conservation and Subsistence in Small Scale Societies.
           Annual Reviews in Anthropology  29: 493 – 524.

Vitousek, Peter M. et al.
    1997     Human Domination of the Earth’s Ecosystems.
           Science 277: 494 – 499.
 
 

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