Basic Biographical Information
David Harris is a leading authority in research into human ecology and agricultural origins. He was born in 1930 in London, England, and in 1950 commenced study of geography at Oxford University and in 1955 leading to a master’s thesis entitled Water Resources and Land Use in Tunisia. His growing interest in environmental diversity and the varied history of human land use took him to the University of California at Berkeley, where he engaged with the work and ideas of Carl Ortwin Sauer. His Ph.D. (1963) thesis entitled Plants, Animals, and Man in the Outer Leeward Islands, West Indies: An Ecological Study of Antigua, Barbuda, and Anguilla was the first of the many projects conducted during his career which took an ecological-historical approach to human land use.
After periods of lecturing at both Berkeley and London, in 1964 he took up a readership in geography at University College London. In 1980 he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of...
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References
Harris, D.R. 1969. Agricultural systems, ecosystems and the origins of agriculture. In The domestication and exploitation of plants and animals, ed. P.J. Ucko and G.W. Dimbleby, 3–15. London: Duckworth.
Harris, D.R. 1971. The ecology of swidden cultivation in the upper Orinoco rain forest, Venezuela. The Geographical Review 61: 475–495.
Harris, D.R., ed. 1980. Human ecology in savanna environments. London: Academic.
Harris, D.R. 1984. Ethnohistorical evidence for the exploitation of wild grasses and forbs: Its scope and archaeological implications. In Plants and ancient man, ed. W. van Zeist and W.A. Casparie, 63–69. Rotterdam: Balkema.
Harris, D.R. 1996. The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia. London/Washington, DC: UCL Press/Smithsonian Institution Press.
Harris, D.R. 2010. Origins of agriculture in western Central Asia: Archaeological–environmental research in Turkmenistan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Press.
Harris, D.R., and G.C. Hillman, eds. 1989. Foraging and farming: The evolution of plant exploitation. London: Unwin Hyman.
Harris, D.R., and K.D. Thomas, eds. 1991. Modelling ecological change: Perspectives from neoecology, palaeoecology and environmental archaeology. London: Institute of Archaeology.
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Jones, M. (2018). Harris, David Russell. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_2276-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_2276-2
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