January 2014
Vol. II, No. 1
Mapping Ancient Canal Systems in Khuzistan
A Critical Application of Site-Canal Association Technique
By Mehrnoush Soroush, New York University, ISAW
At the 2013 ASOR Annual Meeting Mehrnoush Soroush presented the paper “Mapping Ancient Canal Systems in Khuzistan: A Critical Application of Site-Canal Association Technique.” She agreed to come in and record the presentation for the ASOR YouTube channel ASORtv. Below is an abstract of the presentation and the embedded video of the paper. Enjoy!
Near Eastern archaeologists map and date canal systems in order to understand aspects of socio-economic dynamics of ancient societies who built, transformed, or abandoned these canals. How do we know what parts of the system were built or used in a certain period? Site-canal association–dating canals based on the dating of sites aligned with them–is the most common technique. Notwithstanding the widespread use of this technique, disagreements about the dating of sites, in particular in the absence of well-understood local chronologies, loom large over the result of the studies of ancient irrigation system. This paper emphasizes another challenge to the use of this technique: Without understanding the function of a certain canal in a given period-how do we know that the contemporary sites necessarily aligned with that canal?
The paper reports on a current work-in-progress which tries to gain a holistic understanding of the hydraulic function of ancient canal systems prior to using the site-canal association method for dating. The subject of this study is the irrigated plain of Miān-āb in the northeastern part of the Khuzistan Province of Iran. Miān-āb is home to large-scale pre and post Islamic irrigation systems whose configuration and developments are not well understood. Using satellite and aerial imagery and GIS, this study regards canals not as individual elements, but, as components of a functioning hydraulic whole. As such, the research attempts to integrate information derived from hydraulic analysis in order to nuance the application of the site-canal association technique for the dating of the mapped canal systems.
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