Gondwanaland
Modern Histories of an Ancient Supercontinent
Alison Bashford editor Pratik Chakrabarti editor Jarrod Hore editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press
Publishing:27th Oct '26
£96.95
This title is due to be published on 27th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Folding the Deep Past into the Modern Present
The ancient landmass of Gondwanaland began to break up two hundred million years ago into what would become present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australasia, South America, and South Asia—a prehuman “Global South” connected territorially across the southern hemisphere.
The ancient landmass of Gondwanaland began to break up two hundred million years ago into what would become present-day Africa, Antarctica, Australasia, South America, and South Asia—a prehuman “Global South” connected territorially across the southern hemisphere. Named by European geologists in the nineteenth century after the Gondwana region in central India, Gondwanaland has spawned rich and unexpected histories in which the supercontinent has been mythologized and reinvented in response to contemporary geopolitical circumstances. Bridging history, geography, and the geosciences, this volume analyzes the multidimensional interpretations of Gondwanaland in the modern world, tracing its diverse resonances and legacies in politics, science, culture, and the environment across five continents. By reassembling Gondwanaland into a hemispheric history of the southern Earth, this collection considers how deep geological pasts continue to inform geographical and political imaginaries into the present.
From South Africa to central India, from Argentinian Patagonia to the Australian Outback, Gondwanaland recreates an ancient supercontinent as a lived reality uniting past and present. This landmark volume provides a new vision of the history of the earth sciences and moves it to the center of global history.
-- Jim Secord, University of CambridgeFor too long, Earth history revolved around familiar stories of celebrated scientists from Europe and the United States. This wonderful book changes the conversation. With the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland as a conceptual anchor, it offers a deep history of our planet narrated from the South. Ranging across cosmology, geology, theology, and environmental thought, the essays in this volume show how dynamic encounters within diverse ways of knowing shaped our understanding of the globe.
-- Lukas Rieppel, Brown UniversityWhat echoes still remain from the forging and sundering of a mighty ancient continent, hundreds of millions of years ago? This many-faceted intellectual adventure explores the legacy of Gondwanaland: in geology, in geography, in biology, and not least, as it intertwined with and influenced the great currents of history among human societies, its deep-time patterns continuing to resonate on today’s dramatically changed Earth. The diverse perspectives of this excellent book are a model of how barriers between disciplines of knowledge may be spanned to help illuminate some of the deepest connections that we have with our planet.
-- Jan Zalasiewicz, University of LeiceISBN: 9780822949107
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
376 pages