Research

In a tidal wetland, the timing and duration of flooding determine when a field can drain, where sediment accumulates, and which plants can grow. Along a river, a shifting channel can open a route to a settlement or cut it off. These processes create opportunities for cultivation and transport, but they also require people to anticipate and respond to change.

Cultivation depends on environmental knowledge, but also on access to land and the labor needed to prepare and maintain it. A canal or dike records an effort to manage water; its position, construction, and maintenance may also reveal how that effort was organized. We read these structures alongside sediment cores, settlement evidence, and historical records to ask who supplied the knowledge and labor, and how the benefits and costs were distributed.

A canal may continue to drain a field after cultivation has ceased, or require maintenance long after the people who first built it are gone. Following those effects brings the history of a livelihood into the present landscape, where later inhabitants must contend with changes they did not necessarily choose.

Geoarchaeology combines archaeology with the earth sciences to investigate the histories of inhabited landscapes. A sediment core can preserve a sequence of environmental changes, but interpreting that sequence requires knowing where the sediment came from, how it accumulated, and when it was deposited. Field mapping and dating establish that context; archaeological and historical evidence help test how the sequence relates to occupation, cultivation, or changes in water management.

The records do not always agree, and they rarely preserve the same things. Plantation documents may describe production while leaving little account of the environmental knowledge or experience of enslaved workers. Local and descendant knowledge can change the questions we bring to those documents, as well as the interpretation of the places they describe.

The timescales differ. A flood can leave a deposit within hours, while a channel may shift abruptly or migrate over generations. Water-control structures may continue to shape drainage after the agricultural or political system that produced them has changed.

To relate these histories, we need to place social and natural processes on comparable timescales. This does not require dates of equal precision: a written account may name the year of a flood, while a sediment sample places a deposit within a broader interval. With those limits in view, we can ask whether a change in cultivation or settlement preceded, followed, or overlapped a change in the surrounding environment.

In South Carolina, we study former rice impoundments and the sediment records of abandoned river channels. The rice landscapes developed through the knowledge and coerced labor of enslaved people. Their canals and embankments remain part of wetlands whose management has changed, making it possible to investigate how the effects of cultivation persist and how they enter decisions about habitat and water control.

In southern Iraq, our work reconstructs the rivers, wetlands, and coastlines around early Mesopotamian settlements. Cities now far from open water occupied positions within a changing delta, and understanding those positions changes the questions we can ask about cultivation, transport, and the coordination of work. The history of a particular settlement must be established closely enough to distinguish what happened there from a proposed account of the region as a whole.

Wetlands in South Carolina and southern Mesopotamia bear the effects of cultivation and water control, although their histories of settlement, labor, and political authority differ. Comparison asks whether similar physical processes produced different consequences under those social arrangements. Households, communities, and larger institutions could play overlapping roles; those relationships must be established in each setting.

Read about RICE, CORE, and EDEN