Environmental versus social parameters, landscape, and the origins of irrigation in Southwest Arabia (Yemen)
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the Wadi Sana watershed of Hadramawt Governate, Yemen as a case study, this dissertation examines how environmental and social factors structured the origins of irrigation in prehistoric Southwest Arabia.It applies three methods, archaeological survey, geomatics, and ethnoarchaeology set within a framework of scientific and humanistic landscape archaeology.Results of archaeological survey and radiocarbon dating confirm that irrigation originated in Southwest Arabia during the mid 6 th millennium calibrated BP and identify shrj surface runoff irrigation as one of the earliest irrigation techniques in the region.Conflicts between explanations emphasizing environmental versus those stressing social factors have long structured investigations of prehistory and models of transitions to agriculture.To evaluate the relative, interconnected influence of environmental versus social factors this study applies: 1) geomatics to evaluate the hypothesis that locations of ancient irrigation structures in Wadi Sana are closely associated with hydrological variables reflecting close behavioral ties to environmental conditions, and 2) ethnoarchaeology to interpret sociocultural, political, and ideological parameters of ancient irrigation.A sample of 174 irrigation structures is statistically compared with satellite imagery-derived data including landform and hydrological Geographic Information System (GIS) map data layers.A cross-cultural overview of irrigation, synopses of typological and social aspects contemporary irrigation in Yemen, and a preliminary ethnoarchaeological study of water-use and irrigation in present-day Wadi Sana help illustrate how organizational/logistical challenges and perceptions of landscapes and water-rights shaped irrigation's origins.Collective results illustrate why a combination of processual and postprocessual perspectives including both quantitative hypothesis testing and qualitative interpretation best illustrate the relative importance of environmental and social factors.Research findings demonstrate that ancient forager-herders in Wadi Sana chose irrigation structure iii locations based on intimate knowledge of low-energy monsoon runoff along rocky hillslopes, and that new understandings of landscapes as hydraulically malleable domains of anthropogenic control, exclusive rights to water, and new forms of territoriality were crucial to irrigation's origins.iv For my parents, and my brother Bill.v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Yemen is a tremendously fascinating country in so many ways; the greatest thanks must go to the people of Yemen and the Hadramawt who have been such wonderful, gracious hosts.At lunch under the Khuzmum during my first fieldwork in Yemen Joy McCorriston suggested a study of water management in Wadi Sana might provide an excellent dissertation topic.At first the idea seeming daunting-how could one date any of these structures, surely they would not seriate into neat groups?But as I began to appreciate the importance of irrigation in Yemen (through the work of Abdu Ghaleb, R.B. Serjeant, Daniel Varisco and others) the idea seemed increasingly appealing.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it