Going Forward by Looking Back

Felix Riede is Professor of Archaeology at Aarhus University in Denmark. He heads the Laboratory for Past Disaster Science, and his research focuses on the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of Europe.

List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables



Introduction: Framing Catastrophes Archaeologically

Felix Riede and Payson Sheets



Section I: Fire



Chapter 1. Do Deep-Time Disasters Hold Lessons for Contemporary Understandings of Resilience and Vulnerability?: The Case of the Laacher See Volcanic Eruption

Felix Riede and Rowan Jackson



Chapter 2. Risky Business and the Future of the Past: Nuclear Power in the Ring of Fire

Karen Holmberg



Chapter 3. Do Disasters Always Enhance Inequality?

Payson Sheets



Chapter 4. Political Participation and Social Resilience to the 536/540 CE Atmospheric Catastrophe

Peter Neal Peregrine



Chapter 5. Collapse, Resilience, and Adaptation: An Archaeological Perspective on Continuity and Change in Hazardous Environments

Robin Torrence



Chapter 6. Continuity in the Face of a Slowly Unfolding Catastrophe: The Persistence of Icelandic Settlement Despite Large-Scale Soil Erosion

Andrew Dugmore, Rowan Jackson, David Cooper, Anthony Newton, Árni Daníel Júlíusson, Richard Streeter, Viðar Hreinsson, Stefani Crabtree, George Hambrecht, Megan Hicks and Tom McGovern



Chapter 7. Coping through Connectedness: A Network-Based Modeling Approach Using Radiocarbon Data from the Kuril Islands of Northeast Asia

Erik Gjesfjeld and William A. Brown



Section II: Water



Chapter 8. The Materiality of Heritage Post-disaster: Negotiating Urban Politics, People, and Place through Collaborative Archaeology

Kelly M. Britt



Chapter 9. Mound-Building and the Politics of Disaster Debris

Shannon Lee Dawdy



Chapter 10. Catastrophe And Collapse in the Late Pre-Hispanic Andes: Responding for Half a Millennium to Political Fragmentation And Climate Stress

Nicola Sharratt



Chapter 11. Beyond One-Shot Hypotheses: Explaining Three Increasingly Large Collapses in the Northern Pueblo Southwest

Timothy A. Kohler, Laura J. Ellyson, and R. Kyle Bocinsky



Chapter 12. Inherent Collapse? Social Dynamics and External Forcing in Early Neolithic and Modern Southwest Germany

Detlef Gronenborn, Hans-Christoph Strien, Kai Wirtz, Peter Turchin, Christoph Zielhofer, and Rolf van Dick



Chapter 13. El Niño as Catastrophe on the Peruvian Coast

Daniel H. Sandweiss and Kirk A. Maasch



Chapter 14. A Slow Catastrophe: Anthropocene Futures and Cape Town’s “Day Zero”

Nick Shepherd



Conclusion: Rewriting the Disaster Narrative, an Archaeological Imagination

Mark Schuller



Index