Monsoon Rains, Great Rivers and the Development of Farming Civilisations in Asia

Peter Clift is the Charles T. McCord Chair in Petroleum Geology at Louisiana State University. He is an affiliate faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yunnan University, China, and a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. In 2008 he co-authored The Asian Monsoon: Causes, History and Effects (Cambridge). Jade d'Alpoim Guedes is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California. Jade is an environmental archaeologist and ethnobiologist who employs an interdisciplinary research program to understand how humans adapted their foraging practices and agricultural strategies to new environments and have developed resilience in the face of climatic and social change.

• Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. Temporal Variations in the Asian Monsoon; 3. Monsoon and Societies in Southwest Asia; 4. Origins of a Uniquely Adaptive Farming System: Rice Farming Systems in Monsoon Asia; 5. Dryland Farming in the Northern Monsoon Frontier; 6. Recent Changes in Monsoon Climate; 7. Future Monsoon Predictions; References; Index.

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