Description
Bad Year Economics explores the role of risk and uncertainty in human economics within an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and ancient and modern history, the contributors range widely in time and space across hunting, farming and pastoralism, across ancient states, empires, and modern nation states. The aim, however, is a common one: to analyse in each case the structure of variability - particularly with regard to food supply - and review the range of responses offered by individual human communities. These responses commonly exploit various forms of mobility, economic diversification, storage, and exchange to deploy local or temporary abundance as a defence against shortage. Different levels of response are used at different levels of risk. Their success is fundamental to human survival and their adoption has important ramifications throughout cultural behaviour.
Chapter
Risk buffering and social change
Organisation of this volume
2 The spirit of survival: cultural responses to resource variability in North Alaska
The structure of resource variability and coping responses
-The sociocultural context of survival strategies
Faunal resource abundance and predictability in NorthAlaska
Climatic variability during the late prehistoric period
Cultural responses to resource variability in the ethnohistoricperiod
The archaeological record of North Alaska
Period Ila (AD 1140-1350)
Period llb (AD 1350-151G)
Period III (AD 1510-1780)
Discussion: the temporal patterning of coping strategies
The cultural redefinition of scarcity
3 Saving it for later: storage by prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Europe
Selection of the storage option
Some corollaries of storage
4 The role of wild resources in small-scale agricultural systems: tales from the Lakes and the Plains
5 The economy has a normal surplus: economic stability and social change among early farming communities of Thessaly, Greece
Surplus: problems of definition
Early farmers in Thessaly c. 6000-4500 be (the Early andMiddle Neolithic)
Change in the social environment c. 4500-3750 be (the LateNeolithic)
Change in the social environment c. 3750 be-1200 BC (theFinal Neolithic and Bronze Age)
Economic stability and social change in Thessaly, 6000DC-1200BC
Conclusion: risk, surplus and social complexity
6 Changing responses to drought among the Wodaabe of Niger
Traditional responses to drought
The long-term: the impact of economic change on responses to drought
7 Of grandfathers and grand theories: the hierarchised ordering of responses to hazard in a Greek rural community
8 Risk and the polis: the evolution of institutionalized responses to food supply problems in the ancient Greek state
9 Monitoring interannual variability: an example from the period of early state development in southwestern Iran
Craft production and exchange
10 Public intervention in the food supply in pre-industrial Europe
The logic of risk avoidance
The market and its effects
Strategies for dealing with subsistence crises
Varieties of public intervention
Roman and early modern systems compared
The context of public intervention
11 Conclusion: bad year economics
(1) How do societies buffer themselves against periodic variation in food availability?
(2) How do coping activities influence other aspects of cultural organisation?
(3) To what extent can coping strategies provide the impetus for social change?
Bad Year Economics
：Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty
( New Directions in Archaeology )
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