Contents -- Preface -- Contributors -- Introduction: Conceptualizing Socioecological Systems -- Part I Modeling Socioecological Systems: General Perspectives -- 1 Historical Ecology: Integrated Thinking at Multiple Temporaland Spatial Scales -- 2 Toward Developing Synergistic Linkages betweenthe Biophysical and the Cultural: A PalaoenvironmentalPerspective -- 3 Integration of World and Earth Systems:Heritage and Foresight -- 4 World-Systems as Complex Human Ecosystems -- 5 Lessons from Population Ecology for World-SystemsAnalyses of Long-Distance Synchrony -- 6 Sustainable Unsustainability: Toward a Comparative Study of Hegemonic Decline in Global Systems -- Part II Case Studies of Socioenvironmental Change in Prehistory -- 7 Agrarian Landscape Development in Northwestern Europesince the Neolithic: Cultural and Climatic Factors behind a Regional/Continental Pattern -- 8 Climate Change in Southern and Eastern Africa during the Past Millennium and Its Implicationsfor Societal Development -- 9 World-Systems in the Biogeosphere: Urbanization, State Formation, and Climate Change Since the Iron Age -- 10 E urasian Transformations: Mobility, Ecological Change, and the Transmission of Social Institutions in the Third Millennium and the Early Second Millennium b.c.e. -- 11 Climate, Water, and Political-Economic Crises inAncient Mesopotamia and Egypt -- 12 Ages of Reorganization -- 13 Sustainable Intensive Exploitation of Amazonia:Cultural, Environmental, and Geopolitical Perspectives -- 14 Regional Integration and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia:Toward a System Perspective -- Part III Is the World System Sustainable? Attempts toward anIntegrated Socioecological Perspective -- 15 The Human-Environment Nexus: Progress in the Past Decade in the Integrated Analysis of Human and Biophysical Factors.

16 In Search of Sustainability:What Can We Learn from the Past? -- 17 Political Ecology and Sustainability Science:Opportunity and Challenge -- 18 No Island is an "Island": Some Perspectives on Human Ecology and Development in Oceania -- 19 Infectious Diseases as Ecological and Historical Phenomena, with Special Reference to the Influenza Pandemicof 1918-1919 -- 20 Evidence from Societal Metabolism Studies for Ecological Unequal Trade -- 21 Entropy Generation and Displacement:The Nineteenth-Century Multilateral Network of World Trade -- References -- Index.