Tony Wilkinson and the water history of the Near East

Abstract

Water figured centrally throughout Tony Wilkinson’s spectacular career in landscape archaeology in the Near East. His case studies ranged geographically from Yemen to Turkey, Syria to Iran; they included arid desert fringes and (relatedly) moist foothills. The water systems he studied varied in scale from households to villages to states, with a general trend through time from small self-organized systems to massive imperial schemes. Wilkinson drew on any discipline from which data were available, and from which a collaborator or two could be procured. In all cases, however, empirical data from field archaeology held the central position. Despite the scale and number of his projects, collaborations, and students, these field data were overwhelmingly obtained by Wilkinson himself, often under the most challenging weather conditions, made necessary by local agricultural and university academic calendars—negotiating between when fields were clear and courses needed to be taught. Wilkinson often tackled the traces of daily life, the kinds of land use that occurred outside of the interest or notice of the palace elite that have consumed most of the attention of archaeologists. Some of his earliest research investigated falaj (qanat or karez) systems on the Omani coast, which fed sunken fields and powered mills in small oasis towns. He returned to the Arabian peninsula, to trace the small-scale runoff irrigation systems that fed the terraces of highland Yemen. His most widely cited scholarship, however, revolved around the dry-farming agricultural systems that sustained the earliest cities in northern Mesopotamia. He demonstrated how inter-annual variability in rainfall, and householdbased adaptations via manuring, imposed a ceiling on urbanization. Wilkinson’s model