This paper explores the nature and dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental and ecological context using the case study of South Asia's Indus Civilization (ca. 3000-1300 BC). Most early complex societies developed in regions where the climatic parameters faced by ancient subsistence farmers were varied but rain falls primarily in one season. In contrast, the Indus Civilization developed in a specific environmental context that spanned a very distinct environmental threshold, where winter and summer rainfall systems overlap. There is now evidence to show that this region was directly subject to climate change during the period when the Indus Civilization was at its height (ca. 2500-1900 BC). The Indus Civilization, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to understand how an ancient society coped with diverse and varied ecologies and change in the fundamental environmental parameters. This paper integrates research carried out as part of the Land, Water and Settlement project in northwest India between 2007 and 2014. Although coming from only one of the regions occupied by Indus populations, these data necessitate the reconsideration of several prevailing views about the Indus Civilization as a whole and invigorate discussion about human-environment interactions and their relationship to processes of cultural transformation. Adapting to Variable Environments, Being Resilient to Changing Climates Given the considerable importance of climate, climate change, and human/environment relationships in the present, it is perhaps no surprise that there is ongoing interest in the way that humans caused and/or responded to environmental and ecological change in the past (

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Botanical evidence suggests that North Gujarat (India) was a primary center of plant domestication during the mid-Holocene. However, lack of systematic archaeobotanical research and significant taphonomic processes have so far hampered the possibility of substantiating this hypothesis. This paper explores the role of plants in the subsistence strategies of early-middle Holocene populations in this semiarid region and the processes leading to plant cultivation. To do so, we carry out a multiproxy archaeobotanical study-integrating macro and microbotanical remains-at two hunter-gatherer and agropastoral occupations. The results show that the progressive weakening of the Indian summer monsoon ca. 7,000 years ago compelled human populations to adopt seminomadic pastoralism and plant cultivation, which resulted in the domestication of several small millet species, pulses, and sesame.

No abstract

We live in a time of pressing planetary challenges, many of which threaten catastrophic change to the natural environment and require massive and novel coordinated scientific and societal efforts on an unprecedented scale. Universities and other academic institutions have the opportunity and responsibility to assume a leading role in an era when the destiny of the planet is precisely in the hands of human beings. Drawing on the Planetary Health project promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet, Pompeu Fabra University launched in 2018 the Planetary Wellbeing Initiative, a long-term institutional strategy also animated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Planetary Wellbeing might be defined as the highest attainable standard of wellbeing for human and non-human beings and their social and natural systems. Developing the potential of these new concepts involves a substantial theoretical and empirical effort in many different fields, all of them interrelated by the crosscutting challenges of global complexity, interdisciplinarity, and urgency. Close collaboration of science, humanities, and culture is more desperately needed now than ever before in the history of humankind.