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

The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene, and its impacts on farming systems and human settlement. Future changes to the monsoon due to anthropogenically-driven global warming are also discussed. Faced with greater rainfall and more cyclones in South Asia, as well as drying in North China and regional rising sea levels, understanding how humans have developed resilient strategies in the past to climate variations is critical. Containing important implications for the large populations and booming economies in the Indo-Pacific region, this book is an important resource for researchers and graduate students studying the climate, environmental history, agronomy and archaeology of 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.