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Coastal Settings

  • Living reference work entry
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Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series ((EESS))

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Synonyms

Coastal contexts; Coastal habitats

Definition

Within at least the last 70,000 years of human history, coasts have been favored increasingly as places for people to settle, typically in order to take advantage of coastal foods, as well as places from which to interact readily with other human groups (Bailey and Parkington 1988). Long-standing claims that coasts stimulated the development of agriculture by allowing Homo sapiens a unique opportunity to domesticate plants (Sauer 1962; Binford 1968) remain credible. Yet it is also apparent that “many of the world’s coastlines that have the most productive environmental conditions for heavy dependence on marine and intertidal resources … were only colonised by human populations relatively recently” (Bailey 2004, 41). Coastal food exploitation was so important to some societies that it came to define them (Szabó and Amesbury 2011; Jew et al. 2013), whereas for others it was less important, something that might feature in societal...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law and Society, The University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, Australia

    Patrick D. Nunn

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  1. Patrick D. Nunn
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Sociology & Anthropology, Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA

    Allan S. Gilbert

  2. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

    Paul Goldberg

  3. University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Rolfe D. Mandel

  4. University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

    Vera Aldeias

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Nunn, P.D. (2023). Coastal Settings. In: Gilbert, A.S., Goldberg, P., Mandel, R.D., Aldeias, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44600-0_152-1

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