Classical World

Water matters. Its presence and effective management are necessary preconditions for the various and varied agricultural practices that have characteristically underpinned complex societies in human history. Its superabundance, as floods and storms, can place multiscalar stresses upon individuals, households, communities, and societies. Its absence, in the form of drought, is treated in the eye-catchingly titled volume under review here, which presents a series of case studies concerning the dissolution, devolution, or disappearance of states from the Akkadian Empire of the Ancient Near East (Weiss, chapter 3) and the polities of the Late Bronze Age (Kaniewski and Van Campo, chapter 4) through the diverse domains of medieval-period Mesoamerica (Lachniet and Bernal-Uruchurtu, chapter 5; Kennett and Hodell, chapter 6; Thompson and Kolata, chapter 7) to the extensive low-density agrarian-based urban complex of Angkor in mainland southeast Asia (Fletcher et al., chapter 9).

This is an ambitiously conceived volume. Its editor lays his cards on the table early, averring that "Megadroughts are real" before going on to sketch an analytical program that pushes back firmly against what he terms "the unlikely multicausal democracy presumed within 'concatenated effects'" (1, 9). Behind [End Page 364] this rhetorical flourish lies a resolutely embraced methodological imperative, which runs throughout the volume and links its geographically, chronologically, and disciplinarily diffuse contributions together: the search for quantifi-able data of sufficient temporal and spatial granularity to support arguments for causation that rest on observed instances of correlation or coincidence between instances of extreme, protracted aridity and the sudden or slow subsidence of states.

Some readers will, understandably, blanch at such an objective, for it runs perilously close to a stance of environmental determinism—a charge to which Weiss assays a protreptic rebuttal (59). But regardless of whether one is fully convinced by Weiss's argument—or, indeed, by the correlations presented in the nine substantive chapters that follow—this volume contains much of interest, both in its specifics and as a synthetic whole. Each chapter serves to orient the reader to the current state of the relevant debates, sketching their interpretational, conceptual, and/or methodological components. This impulse will be of particular value for readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of measuring ratios of oxygen isotopes in stalagmites (Bar-Yosef et al., chapter 1), the implications of differential quantities of airborne potassium in Greenland ice cores (Weninger and Clare, chapter 2), or the potential for distinctions between early-season and late-season growth of trees to illuminate intra-annual patterns of rainfall (Stahle et al., chapter 8).

But it is as a whole, read in its entirety, that this volume will arguably make its greatest contribution, for it is at this level that we can discern both propositions which can be built upon in future work and challenges for that future work to address. In the first group may be placed, for example, the realization that Holocene climate is—and has been, for the past 12,000 years—characterized not by climatic stability but, rather, by episodic periods of marked instability and variability. While the present volume is rhetorically arrayed around the consideration of drought, it is in fact the unpredictability of this variability—between aridity and humidity, between rainfall maxima and rainfall minima, between monsoon and desiccation—that appears most challenging for the states under discussion here. Thus, for example, in their analysis of the irrigation system of Angkor, Fletcher et al. remark upon the irony of an infrastructure exceptionally well adapted to insuring against drought being irreparably damaged by a small number of extreme flooding events (295-304).

Nonetheless, it is the remaining challenges that emerge most clearly from this volume: of resolving the manifest inconcinnities between different categories of evidence; of sharpening and refining the temporal resolutions of the various chronologies; of filling the manifest gaps in the available data; of convincingly linking indirect, imprecise proxies with tangible processes. These challenges are eloquent expressions of the ineffable complexity...