front cover of Arid Lands in Perspective
Arid Lands in Perspective
Edited by William G. McGinnies and Bram J. Goldman
University of Arizona Press, 1969
These articles represent the combined efforts of many people with varied orientations to summarize aspects of current research and knowledge relevant for the multitudes attempting to inhabit Earth’s warm arid areas, known for their imbalance of natural resources.
 
Contributors:

Michel Batisse
William A. Dick-Peddie
Carl N. Hodges
Richard F. Logan
Roy E. Cameron
Clifford S. Christian
Klaus W. Flach
Ronald L. Heathcote
Douglas H. K. Lee
Lawrence K. Lustig
William G. McGinnies
Peveril Meigs
James T. Neal
Daniel A. Okun
Harland I. Padfield
Patricia Paylore
Rayden A. Perry
Roald A. Peterson
Robert L. Raikes
Courtland L. Smith
Guy D. Smith
Andrew Warren
John C. York
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front cover of Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico
Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico
The Sequence of Technological Change
By William E. Doolittle
University of Texas Press, 1990

Prehistoric farmers in Mexico invented irrigation, developed it into a science, and used it widely. Indeed, many of the canal systems still in use in Mexico today were originally begun well before the discovery of the New World. In this comprehensive study, William E. Doolittle synthesizes and extensively analyzes all that is currently known about the development and use of irrigation technology in prehistoric Mexico from about 1200 B.C. until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century A.D.

Unlike authors of previous studies who have focused on the political, economic, and social implications of irrigation, Doolittle considers it in a developmental context. He examines virtually all the known systems, from small canals that diverted runoff from ephemeral mountain streams to elaborate networks that involved numerous large canals to irrigate broad valley floors with water from perennial rivers. Throughout the discussion, he gives special emphasis to the technological elaborations that distinguish each system from its predecessors. He also traces the spread of canal technology into and through different ecological settings.

This research substantially clarifies the relationship between irrigation technology in Mexico and the American Southwest and argues persuasively that much of the technology that has been attributed to the Spaniards was actually developed in Mexico by indigenous people. These findings will be important not only for archaeologists working in this area but also for geographers, historians, and engineers interested in agriculture, technology, and arid lands.

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front cover of Early Settlement and Irrigation on the Deh Luran Plain
Early Settlement and Irrigation on the Deh Luran Plain
Village and Early State Societies in Southwestern Iran
James A. Neely and Henry T. Wright with a foreword by Kent V. Flannery and contributions by Robert E. Dewar and Pierre de Miroschedji
University of Michigan Press, 1994
The Deh Luran Plain is a microcosm of Mesopotamia and important for the study of a variety of processes in cultural evolution. In this volume (the first of three planned on this project), the authors present a detailed archaeological survey covering periods from the earliest occupation of the plain up to the mid-third millennium BC.
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front cover of Garden of Egypt
Garden of Egypt
Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyum
Brendan Haug
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm is the first environmental history of Egypt’s Fayyūm depression. The volume studies human relationships with flowing water, from the third century BCE to the thirteenth century CE. Until the arrival of modern perennial irrigation in the nineteenth century, the Fayyūm was the only region of premodern Egypt to be irrigated by a network of artificial canals. By linking large numbers of rural communities together in shared dependence on this public irrigation infrastructure, canalization introduced to Egypt a radically new way of interacting both with the water of the Nile and with fellow farmers. Drawing upon ancient Greek papyri, medieval Arabic literature, and modern comparative evidence, this book explores the ways in which the Nile’s water, local farmers, and state power together continually reshaped this irrigated landscape over more than thirteen centuries. Following human/water relationships through both space and time further helps to erode disciplinary boundaries and bring multiple periods of Egyptian history into contact with one another.
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Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia
Thomas F. Glick
Harvard University Press, 1970

Of the communal institutions elaborated by medieval Spaniards, the most significant and longest-lived were the irrigation communities which the Muslims had established centuries earlier in the Valencian region.

The objective of these remarkably democratic communities was justice and equity in water distribution; and the irrigators succeeded in combining traditional rules with consensual authority to maintain their systems with a minimum of conflict. Above the community level, however, regional powers including king, nobles, church, and town all sought to derive, at each other's expense, the maximum benefit from the available water supply. The resultant interplay of power politics was a sharp contrast to the democracy of the communities.

Thomas F. Glick has drawn on original documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to present in this volume a thorough and lively study of Valencian irrigation and society. In Part One Glick describes medieval Valencian irrigation in the epoch of its fullest documentation (1238-4500), focusing on the institutional dynamics of both the local irrigation communities--those irrigating from a single main canal--and the larger regional units, the huertas. He examines the huerta environment and the administration of the irrigation communities and then discusses intracommunity conflict, the city's role in irrigation development, the search for new sources of water, and regional arrangements for irrigation.

Part Two is concerned generally with the spread of Islamic irrigation technology and, more specifically, with cultural diffusion and the persistence of cultural forms during the transition in Spain from Islamic to Christian rule. Here the author examines the antecedents of medieval Valencian irrigation on the basis of Islamic survivals in medieval Christian institutions and of comparative data from other Islamic irrigation systems. He also touches on aspects of acculturation and cultural transition that extend beyond the geographical and temporal bounds of this study, explaining that "the history of Spanish irrigation is but one example of the administrative creativity and genius for cultural synthesis which characterized Iberian culture at the dawn of themodern age."

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front cover of Irrigation and the Cuicatec Ecosystem
Irrigation and the Cuicatec Ecosystem
A Study of Agriculture and Civilization in North Central Oaxaca
Joseph W. Hopkins III
University of Michigan Press, 1984
In this volume, Joseph W. Hopkins III reconstructs the history of the Cuicatec region in Oaxaca, Mexico, from the Aztec empire through the Spanish conquest and into the twentieth century. Hopkins also discusses the archaeology of the region with a particular focus on irrigation systems and agriculture. From 1968 to 1970, Hopkins conducted an archaeological survey and limited excavation in this region, and he presents the results of that fieldwork here.
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front cover of Irrigation's Impact on Society
Irrigation's Impact on Society
Edited by Theodore E. Downing and McGuire Gibson
University of Arizona Press, 1974
The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.      
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front cover of The Keepers of Water and Earth
The Keepers of Water and Earth
Mexican Rural Social Organization and Irrigation
By Kjell I. Enge and Scott Whiteford
University of Texas Press, 1989

Agrarian reforms transformed the Mexican countryside in the late twentieth century but without, in many cases, altering fundamental power relationships. This study of the Tehuacán Valley in the state of Puebla highlights different strategies to manipulate the local implementation of federal government programs. With their very differing successes in the struggle to regain and maintain control of land and water rights, these strategies raise important questions about the meaning of the phrase "locally controlled development."

Because Mexico is dependent on irrigation for 45 percent of its cash crop production, national policy has focused on developing vast government controlled and financed irrigation systems. In the Tehuacán Valley, however, the inhabitants have developed a complex irrigation system without government aid or supervision. Yet, in contrast to most parts of Mexico, water rights can be bought and sold as a commodity, leading to accumulation, stratification, and emergence of a regional elite whose power is based on ownership of land and water. The analysis provides an important contribution to the understanding of local control.

The findings of this study will be important to a wide audience involved in the study of irrigation, local agricultural systems, and the interplay between local power structures and the national government in developing countries. The book also presents unique material on gravity-fed, horizontal wells, known as qanat in the Middle East, which had been unknown in the literature on Latin America before this book.

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front cover of Land of the Underground Rain
Land of the Underground Rain
Irrigation on the Texas High Plains, 1910-1970
By Donald E. Green
University of Texas Press, 1973

The scarcity of surface water which has so marked the Great Plains is even more characteristic of its subdivision, the Texas High Plains. Settlers on the plateau were forced to use pump technology to tap the vast ground water resources—the underground rain—beneath its flat surface.

The evolution from windmills to the modern high-speed irrigation pumps took place over several decades. Three phases characterized the movement toward irrigation. In the period from 1910 to 1920, large-volume pumping plants first appeared in the region, but, due to national and regional circumstances, these premature efforts were largely abortive. The second phase began as a response to the drouth of the Dust Bowl and continued into the 1950s. By 1959, irrigation had become an important aspect of the flourishing High Plains economy. The decade of the 1960s was characterized chiefly by a growing alarm over the declining ground water table caused by massive pumping, and by investigations of other water sources.

Land of the Underground Rain is a study in human use and threatened exhaustion of the High Plains' most valuable natural resource. Ground water was so plentiful that settlers believed it flowed inexhaustibly from some faraway place or mysteriously from a giant underground river. Whatever the source, they believed that it was being constantly replenished, and until the 1950s they generally opposed effective conservation of ground water. A growing number of weak and dry wells then made it apparent that Plains residents were "mining" an exhaustible resource.

The Texas High Plains region has been far more successful in exploiting its resource than in conserving it. The very success of its pump technology has produced its environmental crisis. The problem brought about by the threatened exhaustion of this resource still awaits a solution.

This study is the first comprehensive history of irrigation on the Texas High Plains, and it is the first comprehensive treatment of the development of twentieth-century pump irrigation in any area of the United States.

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front cover of The Marana Community in the Hohokam World
The Marana Community in the Hohokam World
Suzanne K. Fish
University of Arizona Press, 1992
This account of Classic Period settlement in the Tucson Basin between A.D. 1100 and 1300 is the first comprehensive description of the organization of territory, subsistence, and society in a Hohokam community of an outlying region. Broad recovery of settlement patterns reveals in unique detail the developmental history of the Marana Community and its hierarchical structure about a central site with a platform mound. Remains of diverse agricultural technologies demonstrate the means for supporting populations of previously unrecognized size.
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front cover of Water and Power in Highland Peru
Water and Power in Highland Peru
The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development
Paul H Gelles
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Cabanaconde, a town of 5,000 people, is located in the arid Andean highlands. It is dominated by the foreboding Hualca Hualca mountain peak  that is the source of this town’s much-needed water. How the villagers obtain this water, Paul Gelles writes, is not a simple process: the politics of irrigation in this area reflect a struggle for control of vital resources, deeply rooted in the clash between local, ritualized models of water distribution and the secular model put forth by the Peruvian state. Water and Power in Highland Peru provides an insightful case study on the intense conflicts over water rights, and a  framework for studying ethnic conflict and the effects of “development,” not only in Peru, but in other areas as well.

Most of the inhabitants of Cabanaconde do not identify themselves with the dominant Spanish-speaking culture found in Peru. And the Peruvian state, grounded in a racist, post-Colonial ethos, challenges the village’s long-standing, non-Western framework for organizing water management.

Gelles demonstrates that Andean culture is dynamic and adaptive, and it is a powerful source of ethnic identity, even for those who leave the village to live elsewhere. Indigenous rituals developed in this part of the world, he states, have become powerful tools of resistance against interference by local elites and the present-day Peruvian state. Most importantly, the micropolitics of Cabanaconde provide a window into a struggle that is taking place around the world.

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front cover of The Yuma Reclamation Project
The Yuma Reclamation Project
Irrigation, Indian Allotment, and Settlement Along the Lower Colorado River
Robert Sauder
University of Nevada Press, 2009

In the arid American West, settlement was generally contingent on the availability of water to irrigate crops and maintain livestock and human residents. Early irrigation projects were usually the cooperative efforts of pioneer farmers, but by the early twentieth century they largely reflected federal intentions to create new farms out of the western public domain. The Yuma Reclamation Project, authorized in 1904, was one of the earliest federal irrigation projects initiated in the western United States and the first authorized on the Colorado River. Its story exemplifies the range of difficulties associated with settling the nation’s final frontier—the remaining irrigable lands in the arid West, including Indian lands—and illuminates some of the current issues and conflicts concerning the Colorado River. Author Robert Sauder’s detailed, meticulously researched examination of the Yuma Project illustrates the complex multiplicity of problems and challenges associated with the federal government’s attempt to facilitate homesteading in the arid West. He examines the history of settlement along the lower Colorado River from earliest times, including the farming of the local Quechan people and the impact of Spanish colonization, and he reviews the engineering problems that had to be resolved before an industrial irrigation scheme could be accomplished. The study also sheds light on myriad unanticipated environmental, economic, and social challenges that the government had to confront in bringing arid lands under irrigation, including the impact on the Native American population of the region.The Yuma Reclamation Project is an original and significant contribution to our understanding of federal reclamation endeavors in the West. It provides new and fascinating information about the history of the Yuma Valley and, as a case study of irrigation policy, it offers compelling insights into the history and consequences of water manipulation in the arid West.

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