From Fire Wielders to Empire Builders: Human Impact on the Global Environment before 1492

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Environmental problems are often considered a modern issue, but people have been transforming their surroundings for millennia. This course is an introduction to the study of premodern environmental history that includes case studies from around the globe. We will begin with foraging people burning landscapes and then study how farmers came to build their own agricultural ecosystems. We will study how the expansion of commerce and the growth of political organizations vastly increased the ability of our species to transform environments. Since this is a heavily interdisciplinary field that depends on a wide variety of sources, the course will include primary source readings from scientific and archaeological articles and premodern texts. P