Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 324

Without doubt, the most troubling aspect of this book is its inappropriate and misleading title. The product of a symposium on water management and agricultural strategies, the book’s focus is more on the former than the latter. The book contains little about crop plants, tillage, planting, harvesting, and related aspects and activities such as calendars and labour. It is almost entirely about water, its management, and the physical and social systems developed for its distribution and utilization. And, were it not published by an archaeological institute named prominently on the cover, one would not quickly realize that it is about prehistory. It does, however, draw on numerous ethnohistoric and ethnographic parallels.

Containing fifteen chapters by some of the best archaeologists working in the field, the book is organized regionally – Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, South America – as well as having an introductory and a discussion chapter. Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America apparently did not have any hydraulic societies worthy of inclusion, or, perhaps, they will comprise a future volume. Each chapter has its own list of references, which frugal scholars, especially those with strong regional interests, who prefer to photocopy chapters rather than buy books, will surely appreciate. This format, however, has its drawbacks. There is much duplication in citations, but more problematic than an increased page length is the lack of consistency in regard to subtitles. For example, Ester Boserup’s 1965 book, The conditions of agricultural growth, is cited in six chapters, only two of which include the all-important subtitle – The economics of agrarian change under population pressure. And, this oversight is more than simply one of copy-editing. All too often, indeed nearly always, archaeologists focus on the shortcomings of population pressure as an explanation, and forget that Boserup was not an anthropologist but an agricultural economist by training and a development consultant by profession, and that the real importance of her work lies in microeconomic theory. Only three of the contributors, Morrison, Kirch and Erickson, seem to understand and appreciate this point, and their chapters are richer for it.

Given the book’s sub-continental organization, myopic, parochial, and provincial regional specialists will quickly thumb their way to those two or three chapters that cover their area of interest. This is of course due to archaeology being regionally-rooted rather than topically-focused. The book would be much more important than it is had it been organized thematically. For example, one of the symposium’s goals was to develop comprehensive models to explain how water management and agricultural strategies operated over long spans of time (p.2). Models of sustainability, an issue not even mentioned in the index, based on data synthesized from a number of examples (not case studies) would be a monumental contribution. The same goes for other issues such as localized versus centralized decision- making, and household consumption versus state use.

Although this book is not all that it could be, it is nevertheless a fine volume. Each of the chapters is a major contribution in its own right. For brevity, I will only highlight a few. Robert McC. Adams articulates convincingly that as large as the irrigation system was in Sasanian Mesopotamia, it was actually only one aspect of a complex society that constructed other equally large features with ‘top-down’ policies. Heather M.-L. Miller provides great insight into the way land ownership and its correlates restricted the hierarchical power of state-level political units. In dealing with medieval Spain, Thomas F.Glick makes an important point by illustrating the difference between the long-held notion of ‘variability’ and the previously not-considered notion of ‘stochasticity’ in regards to stream flow and the availability of water for agriculture. Finally, Gary M.Feinman demonstrates that the prehispanic Zapatec had a powerful state even though agriculture in general and irrigation specifically, as well as other aspects of the economy, were situated domestically.

These few examples should illustrate that two themes run through the entire volume, the seminal ideas of Karl Wittfogel, and scale. Much has been written about the former, and doubtless will be for years to come, even though there is probably not much more to be said. The latter, however, is a topic that deserves a great deal of future attention, and this volume might be considered a call-to-arms on this point. There are many nuances to water control and agriculture that have long been overlooked – overshadowed – by previous work that focused on obviously important large features, systems, and issues.