Kwakwaka’wakw “Clam Gardens”

Ancient Clam Gardens Increased Shellfish Production: Adaptive Strategies from the Past Can Inform Food Security Today

Maintaining food production while sustaining productive ecosystems is among the central challenges of our time, yet, it has been for millennia. Ancient clam gardens, intertidal rock-walled terraces constructed by humans during the late Holocene, are thought to have improved the growing conditions for clams. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the beach slope, intertidal height, and biomass a...

Between a rock and a soft place: Using optical ages to date ancient clam gardens on the Pacific Northwest

Rock-walled archaeological features are notoriously hard to date, largely because of the absence of suitable organic material for radiocarbon dating. This study demonstrates the efficacy of dating clam garden wall construction using optical dating, and uses optical ages to determine how sedimentation rates in the intertidal zone are affected by clam garden construction. Clam gardens are rock-wa...

Creative Gardens

Can we move beyond simply networking creative individuals to establishing diverse communities of practice for innovation through discursive methods. Furthermore, can we digitise their creativity activities within an integrative socio-cultural collaborative technology platform that could then support distributed innovation. First, we consider the complexity of creative cultures from the perspect...

Iranian Languages as Gardens

The tobacco gardens

In 2008 it was closed and dismantled the spectacular Duke Gardens near Princeton University. They were created by the famous heiress Doris Duke, in honor of her father, James Buchanan Duke. This last gentleman caused 100 million deaths during the 20th century. The gardens mentioned demonstrated, perhaps trivially, what was stated by philosopher Walter Benjamin: There has never been a document o...