Vern Scarborough: His Research Efforts Hold Water

Vern Scarborough pours himself into his work, and from that dedication has flowed book chapters and books, journal articles, international field research and a solid reputation in bridging the topics of water, power and culture in the ancient world (while drawing parallels to the modern world too).

“I just gravitated to water” is how Scarborough, UC professor of anthropology, explains the source of his research interest.  “Early in my career, I would have one-year teaching appointments – in Sudan, in Pakistan – or I’d be doing contract environmental impact studies in connection with archaeological sites.  And somehow or other, I was always considering the power, potential, and effects of water and writing about it at night.”

After joining the University of Cincinnati faculty in 1988, Scarborough channeled his research energies into studying the role of water in the rise and decline of ancient Mayan civilizations, work that was featured by National Geographic in 1994.  He and UC colleague Nicholas Dunning literally ran the risks of heat exhaustion (working in temperatures reaching 100 degrees), drug traffickers and the occasional jaguar to find significant clues as to why early Mayan centers in the lowlands of Central America were abandoned about 1,000 years ago.  They determined that growing populations, deforestation and increased agricultural cultivation strained and spoiled perennial wetlands and shallow lakes formed by large depressions in limestone rock.  These wetlands and lakes, which had served as year-round water sources, became seasonal mud holes half the year – unable to support the Maya’s largest urban centers.

“They were basically fragile environments to begin with.  We think it was a combination of natural climatic change and human interference, but the Maya were probably the biggest culprit with deforestation and widespread quarrying to construct their cities,” he explained.

Because of all of his groundbreaking work related to the ancient Maya, colleague Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan, also a Mayan archaeologist, credits Scarborough with carving out a whole new subfield.  “Prior to Scarborough’s fieldwork and attention to the topic of water management, most Mayanists focused on religion, writing and temples in the jungle.  With unusual energy and creativity, Scarborough devoted himself to determining how the Maya coped with the annual dry season, how they stored water and how they re-contoured the natural hills to create artificial ‘water-mountains,’ constructing terraces and paved courtyards to lead rainfall into reservoirs and cisterns for use during the dry season.”

While Scarborough’s studies help to answer questions about the past, he stresses their importance to the present and the future.  For instance, from the past, we can deduce that modern  slash-and-burn farming methods are a threat to today’s rainforests.  In addition, he says events in the Middle East are a turn of the water wheel, repeating ancient history.

According to Scarborough, “Water is the key lever to support the labor used to extract another controllable resource: Oil.  Water is inflaming Turkey’s relations with both Iraq and Syria.  Turkey has built several dams that affect the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their life-giving flow into both Iraq and Syria.  In 1990, Turkey cut off the flow of the Euphrates completely for three weeks, causing near panic in the Syrian capital of Damascus and blackouts around the country.”  

This is nothing new, Scarborough adds.  “As Mark Twain said, ‘Whiskey’s for drinkin’; water’s for fightin’ over.’  Our future is our past.  During the early second millennium B.C., two cities – Lagash and Umma – wrote the world’s first treaty concerning the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

Water as conflict and controversy may seem strange to us in the water-rich Midwest, but there’s a rising tide of water conflicts around the globe, in countries both rich and poor.  “Controlling water means controlling food.  It’s almost akin to being able to control air,” Scarborough explained, adding, “One morning in a café several miles north of Santa Fe, my best friend – my wife Pat Mora – and I overheard a heated debate that brought home the importance of water management.  In the adjoining booth could be heard vociferous concerns about the apportionment of a nearby canalized water source.  The conversation was in Spanish, but it could have been in Arabic or Chinese.  Water issues are fundamentally similar everywhere.”  

Scarborough’s studies of the power that water represents and how ancient Old and New World societies – from autonomous villages to more complex chiefdoms and states – organized themselves in relation to its control and use are encompassed in his latest book, “The Flow of Power: Ancient Water Systems and Landscapes.”  It pools much that he’s learned in his last 15 years of research and deftly explores how human societies either maintained their stability or engineered their own collapse by means of attitudes and policies surrounding water.  The book focuses on the Harappan society of South Asia and once-extant societies in Sri Lanka, the ancient peoples of highland Mexico and lowland Central America and the prehistoric American southwest as well as Bronze Age Greece.  But had it included all of Scarborough’s research interests, it could also have given  consideration to ancient Mesopotamia, medieval Spain, Versailles and many other time periods and places. 

As happy as he’s been with the stream of work he’s been able to produce in the last decade or so – a body of work that deservedly earned him UC’s Rieveschl Award – it’s all pretty much water under the bridge for Scarborough at this point.  He’s quite ready to move on to new challenges, and is, in fact, already planning his next book, a look at “holy water,” an examination of the connections between water, ritual and religion.