Sustainability strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future, but increasingly recognizes the tradeoffs among these many needs. Who benefits? Who bears the burden? How are these difficult decisions made? Are people aware of these hard choices? This timely volume brings the perspectives of ethnography and archaeology to bear on these questions by examining case studies from around the world. Written especially for this volume, the essays by an international team of scholars offer archaeological and ethnographic examples from the southwestern United States, the Maya region of Mexico, Africa, India, and the North Atlantic, among other regions. Collectively, they explore the benefits and consequences of growth and development, the social costs of ecological sustainability, and tensions between food and military security.
1. Introduction. Multiple perspectives on tradeoffs Michelle Hegmon; 2. Diversity, reciprocity, and the emergence of equity-inequity tradeoffs Jacob Freeman, Andrea Torvinen, Ben A. Nelson and John M. Anderies; 3. Modeling tradeoffs in a rural Alaska mixed economy: hunting, working, and sharing in the face of economic and ecological change Shauna B. BurnSilver, Randall B. Boone, Gary P. Kofinas and Todd J. Brinkman; 4. Trading off food and military security in contact-era New Guinea Paul Roscoe; 5. Will agricultural technofixes feed the world? Short- and long-term tradeoffs of adopting high-yielding crops Amanda L. Logan; 6. Tradeoffs in precolumbian Maya water management systems: complexity, sustainability, and cost Christian Isendahl and Scott Heckbert; 7. Growth and inter-generational tradeoffs: archaeological perspectives from the Mimbres region of the US Southwest; 8. Vulnerability to food insecurity: tradeoffs and their consequences Margaret C. Nelson, Ann P. Kinzig, Jette Arneborg, Richard Streeter and Scott E. Ingram; 9. Tradeoffs in coast Salish social action: balancing autonomy, inequality, and sustainability Colin Grier and Bill Angelbeck; 10. Tradeoffs and human well-being: achieving sustainability in the Faroe Islands Seth D. Brewington; 11. Household- vs national-scale food storage: perspectives on food security from archaeology and contemporary India Katherine A. Spielmann and Rimjhim M. Aggarwal; 12. Some analytical tradeoffs of talking about tradeoffs: on perspectives lost in estimating the costs and benefits of inequality Alf Hornborg.
Michelle Hegmon has dedicated her career to expanding the reach of archaeology, drawing insights from her own research in the Mimbres region of the US Southwest. She has contributed to archaeological theory, the study of style and ceramics, gender research, and social perspectives on ecology. Currently, she is developing a new paradigm, the Archaeology of the Human Experience (AHE), concerned with understanding what it was actually like to live in the past that archaeologists study. The study of tradeoffs, the hard choices people have to make, is part of this AHE perspective.
