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Back to Events

Cross-disciplinary approaches to the Hydraulic Landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean, 1200-1900CE

International Workshop, 21-23 April 2016

Orient-Institut Beirut and Balamand University

April, 21 to April 23, 2016

21 /04
to
23 /04

For PDF version click here

 

Financed by the Orient-Institut Beirut, Balamand University and the Danish Institute, Damascus

Organisers:

Astrid Meier (Orient-Institut Beirut)

Stephen McPhillips (University of Copenhagen)

Souad Slim and Elie Dannaoui (Balamand University)

 

Hydraulic Landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean is an international Workshop which brings together specialists of various disciplines and periods in order to debatenew approaches to integrating the rural worlds of the Eastern Mediterranean into our research agendas. Although historians often mention the importance of rural economies and communities in early modern and modern state formation, history has been, and still continues to be, written predominantly from an urban perspective. The lack of available sources may present one major obstacle to writing about rural worlds; yet when its variant strands are put into conversation with each other, the data available to anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, archaeologists and scientists (biology, geology, climatology etc.) can help to develop a decidedly non-urban perspective on the past and present of diverse landscapes. This cross-disciplinary approach promises ground-breaking insights into the workings of rural and urban societies as well as the state formation in the eastern Mediterranean and their historical trajectories, beyond easy but commonly held assertions of “dead zones”, agrarian stagnation and decline or ongoing desertification.

 

To achieve this aim, researchers need to learn to read landscapes from different angles, as ‘texts’ and ‘palimpsests’ that yield different readings to archaeologists, historians,ethnographers, scientists, specialists of migration or of visual arts and historical literature.To facilitate a shared debate between the disciplines, the focus of this workshop is on the use of water and water systems as constitutive elements of every landscape, ranging from the most arid, i.e. deserts, to those provided with plenty of water. Water is a means of connection as well as an object of competition and conflict. Focusing on water and the traces it leaves in the material world, as well as in texts, visual representations and in memory, provides glimpses into the making of social, economic and political spaces as well as that of performed spaces that we have labelled, borrowing from the terminology used by Tony Wilkinson, “hydraulic landscapes”.

 

Careful examination of the various types of material evidence – archaeological, historical, ethnographic, microfaunal – shows that the use of water resources in these landscapes remained a constant and locally developed technological know-how through-out the period under investigation. This included many complex aspects of water management (irrigation, storage, distribution) involving greater or lesser degrees of centralized organisation, and an increasingly present employment of hydraulic power. Using cross-disciplinary methodologies in conjunction with the digital tools at our disposal, the workshop wants to map various examples of hydraulic landscapes around the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, we invite papers that address the what, where and how of hydraulic arrangements and routines in specific landscapes in explicitly cross disciplinary perspectives. Our approach also encourages researchers to include questionings about:

 

  • the role of movement in the structuring of landscapes, considering movements of people, things, ideas and symbols, not only as vectors of contact between rural and urban communities, but more specifically in relation to the exploitation of water and other resources;
  • demography, settlement (permanent/impermanent) and migration;
  • the economic landscapes of agrarian and pastoral practices, innovation, local and
  • outside investments (subsistence vs. cash crops such as cotton, silk, tobacco, etc.);
  • the means to secure the distribution of water and other resources (legal and social arrangements, fortification, militarisation);
  • the role of water and hydraulic landscapes in maps, travelogues, memoirs and other textual and visual representations

 

Programme  

Wednesday 20th April

19:30:

 Welcome dinner for the participants in the garden of the Orient-Institut, Zuqaq al-Blat, Beirut

 

Thursday 21st April

The workshop will take place in room FHS102 (Faculty of Health Sciences - Main Campus - Balamand)

9:45

Welcome address by the Vice-President of Balamand University, Prof. Dr. Georges Nahas

10:00

Introduction: Hydraulic landscapes: Cross-disciplinary approaches
Elie Dannaoui, Astrid Meier, Annika Rabo, Souad Slim

Session 1: Historical and archaeological approaches to landscapes of water

10:30 – 11:00

Geo-spatial and traditional survey approaches to hydraulic landscapes in Syria and Lebanon

Jennie Bradbury & Stephen McPhillips (Universities of Oxford and Copenhagen)

11:00 –11:30

Market-garden irrigation in Ottoman Syria: Damascus, Hama and Saida

James Reilly (University of Toronto)

11:30

Coffee break

Session 2 : Socio-political aspects of Ottoman water use

12:00 – 12:30

Spring water management the High Matn in late Ottoman Lebanon (in Arabic)

Abd Allah Said (Université Libanaise)

12:30 – 13:00

An Ottoman mill complex at Lake Riza, in the region of Butrint, Albania

Jose Carvajal (University College London Qatar)

13.00 – 13:30

Hydraulic Ottoman Lebanon: The watermills of Nahr al-Jawz

Souad Slim (University of Balamand)

13:30

Lunch

14:45

Tour of Balamand Monastery

Session 3 : Diachronic and interregional perspectives on hydraulic installations

16:00 – 16:30

A Hydraulic Network of Cisterns and Tanks Uncovered at Anfeh, Lebanon

Nadine Panayot–Haroun (University of Balamand, Department of Archaeology)

16:30 – 17:00

The role of water management of the Zāyandeh Rūd river in the rural landscape changes of Lanjān during the Safavid period (1502–1736CE)

Jaleh Kamalizad (University of Teheran)

17:00 – 17:30

Mount Athos’ monastic water-mills in the areas of Thessaloniki and Chalkidiki in the 12th-16th centuries. Archaeological and historical data

Paschalis Androudis and Nikolaos Theodoridis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

17:30 – 18:00

Discussion

Friday 22nd  April

Session 4 : Objects, words and artisanal traditions: textual and archaeological perspectives on the hydraulic past

9:00 – 9:30

Arrival

9:30 - 10:00

The Iqlim el Kharrub Archaeological Survey Lebanon

Karol Juchniewicz (University of Warsaw)

10:00 – 10:30

Historical approaches to watermills in north Jordan

Vanessa Guéno & Lorraine Abu-Azizeh (Institut français du Proche Orient, Amman)

10:30 – 11:00

Watermills in the Province of Tripoli according to the Ottoman tax register of 1554 (in Arabic)

Issam Khalife (Université Libanaise)

11:00

Coffee

Session 5 : The modern and the traditional

11:30 – 12:00

The Ayn al-Mutran project (1897 to 1907): Bringing water to Lebanese villages in the Zghorta region (in Arabic)

Simon Abdelmassih (Lebanese Universiy)

12:00 – 12:30

Sustainability of Traditional Water Management Systems for landscapes in Tunisia

Noureddin Gaaloul (National Research Institute for Rural Engineering Water and Forestry, Tunis)

12:30 – 13:00

Subterranean water channels in the High Metn, Lebanon: a 19th century phenomenon?

Reda Salim Bou Fakhreddine (Lebanese University)

13:30

Lunch

Session 6 : Connections and interfaces

15:00 – 15:30

Bridging Hydraulic Landscapes in the Late Byzantine Empire

Galina Fingarova (University of Vienna)

15:30 – 16:00

Dreaming of Fresh Water: Seascapes and Fresh Water Management in the Post-Medieval Mani Peninsula, Greece

Rebecca M. Seifried (University of Illinois at Chicago)

16:00

Coffee break

Session 7 : Scarcity and abundance in hydraulic landscapes

16:15 – 16:45

Capricious Precipitation: The Management of Rainfed Agriculture in Syria

Elizabeth Williams (Brown University)

17:00

Closing discussion and summary

Annika Rabo (University of Stockholm)

 

Future activities

Astrid Meier, Souad Slim, Stephen McPhillips

Saturday 23rd   April 

Excursion to Batrun and the Nahr al-Jawz for participants


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