Water and Society ─ Resilience, Decline, and Revival from Ancient Times to the Present

As water availability, management and conservation become global challenges, there is now wide consensus that historical knowledge can provide crucial information to address present water crises. Moreover, water takes in different forms from rainfall to groundwater and soil moisture, and history offers unique opportunities to appreciate the array of solutions and mechanisms societies have developed over time to deal with water in all its forms. This volume explores how ancient water systems relate to resilience and sustainability in the present and inform the future. By eliciting historic water management systems and responses to, and impact of water-driven catastrophes in different environments in the past, contributors to this volume present historical knowledge about the long-term resilience and sustainable use of water resources. But rather than limiting the discussion to issue of the past in the context of that past, the volume goes further to address the resonance and legacy of water histories in the present and future. The volume speaks to an archaeological and non-archaeological scholarly audience, and is a primary reference text on the subject for researchers and graduate students from a variety of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary backgrounds including archaeology, anthropology, history, ecology, geography, geology, architecture, and development studies.

Federica Sulas (PhD Cantab) is an archaeologist with research interests in historical landscapes. She has conducted field research Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Sardinia. As assistant professor at UrbNet, Aarhus University (Denmark), she is developing collaborative research on urban transitions and social complexity in eastern and southern Africa.

Innocent Pikirayi (PhD, Uppsala) is professor in archaeology at the University of Pretoria. He researches on complex societies in southern and central Africa and is currently conducting geoarchaeological investigations at Great Zimbabwe to understand the ancient city’s water resources. He is also interested in ancient urbanism and the globalization of the early-modern world.