Water archaeology
The archaeology of water is a big subject. Where to begin? Perhaps with the news of a project in the Sierra Nevada (literally ‘Snowy Mountains’) that rise to the north of Granada in southern Spain. In the sheltered south-facing valleys of Las Alpujarras, the southern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, farmers have irrigated their alpine meadows and terraced orchards for centuries with water from distant springs high in the mountains.
Forming a network thousands of kilometres in extent, these are rather prosaically called acequias (‘ditches’ or channels), but they form part of a vital ecosystem whereby meltwater from snow seeps into underground aquifers; these in turn feed springs, whose water is channelled at a barely perceptible gradient to farms and villages where the water is released via sluices to an agreed timetable.
The acequias that carry the water are leaky, but that allows grasses and plants to grow alongside the channels; their matted roots help to stabilise the banks that support the channels. Concreting the channels leads to the banks drying up and the channels collapsing. The system is dependent on regular maintenance, and when land is abandoned, blockages and breaches rapidly halt the water flow.
Neolithic and/or Bronze Age mines: Excavating the CA archive