ABOUT THIS BOOK

Today, our societies face great challenges with water, both in terms of quantity and quality, but many of these challenges also existed at points in the past. Focusing on Asia, Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present seeks to highlight the issues that emerge or reemerge across different societies and periods and asks what they can tell us about water sustainability. Incorporating cutting-edge research and pioneering field surveys on past and present water management practices, the interdisciplinary contributors together identify how societies managed water resource challenges and utilized water in ways that allowed them to evolve, persist, or drastically alter their environment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Altaweel is a Reader in Near Eastern Archaeology at the UCL Institute of Archaeology having held previous appointments and joint appointments at the University of Chicago, University of Alaska, and Argonne National Laboratory. He has conducted fieldwork in various parts of the Middle East and North America, focusing on environmental and social-environmental interactions in modern and ancient societies. In addition to fieldwork, Dr Altaweel focuses on the use of quantitative and analytical methods to gain insight into water management and water use issues. Yijie Zhuang has conducted intensive fieldwork in different parts of East and Southeast Asia. He is primarily interested in the reconstruction of water management systems and agricultural ecologies of both the monsoonal and arid regions of Asia and how these related to long term social evolution.

REVIEWS

"Incorporating research and field surveys on past and present water management practices, the interdisciplinary contributors to this book together identify how societies managed water resource challenges and used water in ways that allowed them to evolve, persist, or drastically alter their environment.'
AWWA, American Water Works Association"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

"1. Introduction: Interdisciplinary research into water
management and societies
Yijie Zhuang and Mark Altaweel

Part I: Modelling long-term change
2. Holocene evolution of rivers, climate and human societies
in the Indus basin
Peter D. Clift and Liviu Giosan

3. Habitat hysteresis in ancient Egypt
Judith Bunbury

4. Geoarchaeology of prehistoric moated sites and water
management in the Middle River Yangtze, China
Duowen Mo and Yijie Zhuang

5. Rice fields, water management and agricultural development
in the prehistoric Lake Taihu region and the Ningshao Plain
Yijie Zhuang

Part II: Technologies across time and space
6. Recognition criteria for canals and rivers in the
Mesopotamian floodplain
Jaafar Jotheri
7. The Udhruh region: A green desert in the hinterland
of ancient Petra
Mark Driessen and Fawzi Abudanah

8. Flowing into the city: Approaches to water management
in the early Islamic city of Sultan Kala, Turkmenistan
Tim Williams

9. Water management across time: Dealing with too much
or too little water in ancient Mesopotamia
Mark Altaweel

10. Framing urban water sustainability: Analysing
infrastructure controversies in London
Sarah Bell

Part III: Water and societies
11. Early Indian Buddhism, water and rice: Collective
responses to socio-ecological stress: Relevance for global
environmental discourse and Anthropocene studies
Julia Shaw

12. Water for the state or water for the people? Wittfogel in
South and South East Asia in the first millennium
Janice Stargardt

13. Agricultural development, irrigation management and
social resilience in ancient Korea
Heejin Lee

14. Quoting Gandhi, or how to study ancient irrigation when
the future depended on what one did today
Maurits W. Ertsen"