
In memory of
Karl W ButzerUniversity of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Geography and The Environment
Karl W Butzer
BSc MSc DSc
About
482
Publications
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Introduction
Butzer’s research has focused on the relationships between the environment and prehistoric people or more recent societies. In collaboration with a wide range of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists, he worked at both larger, regional scales and at the site-specific micro-level. Butzer remains deeply engaged with an interdisciplinary environmental history, critical of the recent turn to a simplistic environmental determinism, and concerned about the prospects of global warming.
Publications
Publications (482)
At some point during the Holocene, human action began to accelerate or redirect landscape and biospheric evolution. Basic questions for this preface are whether we should define this new dynamism as an ‘Anthropocene era’ and how might it be delimited with respect to absolute time or to the Holocene. Traditional geo-stratigraphic nomenclature develo...
The fluctuations of the key East African lakes discussed are summarized in Fig. 4 which also includes the available evidence from Lake Rukwa (42) and Lake Chad (43) Exceot for Lake Victoria, all of these now lack surface outlets and are situated in much drier climates than the major lakes of the Western Rift Valley, which remain filled to their ove...
Environmental history is a multidisciplinary enterprise united by shared interests in ecological change and the complex interactions between people and the environment. Its practitioners include expertise in the natural sciences, in history or archaeology, or in political ecology and related social sciences; but there is no agreement on a common ag...
Historical collapse of ancient states poses intriguing social-ecological questions, as well as potential applications to global change and contemporary strategies for sustainability. Five Old World case studies are developed to identify interactive inputs, triggers, and feedbacks in devolution. Collapse is multicausal and rarely abrupt. Political s...