Ancient Middle Niger

Cambridge University Press
052181300X - Ancient Middle Niger - Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape - by Roderick J. McIntosh
Table of Contents

List of illustrations		page viii
Preface		xii
Chronology		xv
Map of the Middle Niger		xvi
1	Discovery	1
	Jenne-jeno “discovered” to the world	1
	City without Citadel	10
	Ex astra (a brief history of values)	21
	Co-evolution: an alternative path	27
2	Transformed landscapes	45
	Historical Ecology	45
	Mesopotamia, with a difference	56
	Paleoclimate: phase shifts at multiple time-scales	73
	Geokistics: risk, surprise, and subsistence security	89
3	Accommodation	101
	Pulse Model	101
	Ground truthing the Pulse Model	123
	Specialists and the deep-time core rules of Mande	129
4	Excavation	144
	Recognizing heterogeneity	144
	Anchors and variability: the core sequence	162
	“Polynucleated sprawl”: Urban Clusters	181
5	Surveying the hinterland	192
	Prior strategies	192
	Systematic urban hinterland	197
	Resilience, urban sustainability, and the self-organizing landscape	203
6	Comparative urban landscapes	209
	Alternative cityscapes: Mesopotamia and the Nile	209
	China: the clustered alternative	221
References		230
Index		251

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