Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Head of Academic Aairs John Martinson Honors College
Courtesy Faculty Department of Anthropology, Purdue University
Internal drainage basins in arid and semi-arid environments comprise about 20% of the total land area on earth but make up about half of all water-stressed regions. Understanding the dynamics of change in these closed-loop water systems and how we can adapt to them are therefore critical to addressing future sustainability. Agriculture, industry, and climate change all disturb the fragile water balances of internal basins and have caused alarming rates of depletion in rivers and lakes. The most emblematic example of this is undoubtedly the drying of the Aral Sea, a massive lake in Central Asia that has lost over 90% of its water volume since 1960. Studies that investigate the proximal causes of these water losses and how to mitigate them routinely fail to account for the prolonged effects of humans as dynamic ecosystem engineers. Building upon the Aral Sea Basin’s exceptionally rich legacy of archaeological research on irrigation, I present new results from field studies that demonstrate how a longer view of human-environment co-evolution might direct our attention to alternatives for thinking about adaptive futures in internal drainage basins.
Joint Lecture Series of the Cluster of Excellence EurAsian Transformation in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Archaeological Ethics and Practice in Cultural Heritage and the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University. Supported by University of Vienna and the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
