For five years from 1976 to 1980 the archaeology and environment of a block of landscape centred around Shaugh Moor on south-west Dartmoor were analysed prior to the destruction of some of the evidence by china clay working. The investigations began in 1976 with a survey of the field monuments and the initiation of soil, vegetation, small mammal and phosphate studies in addition to the search for peat deposits of sufficient antiquity. From 1977 the programme was determined by the encroachment of the quarries and other works, so that early in that year a group of cairns were excavated (site 10) and subsequently the first of two seasons work on a walled enclosure (site 15) was initiated. The excavation of the enclosure was completed in 1978 and in that year it was also necessary to undertake a small investigation near the northern edge of the project area on the Trowlesworthy cross-dyke (site 202) and near its southern edge on Wotter Playground (site 201). Settlements and field systems were surveyed and excavated on Wotter Common in 1979 and these investigations were completed in 1980 when the Saddlesborough Reave, which crosses the centre of the project area from east to west was also surveyed in detail and sampled by excavation.More field work could have been undertaken on threatened areas and indeed a limited operation was undertaken in 1981 on the Saddlesborough Reave to confirm some points of detail. Instead, it was thought best to conclude the project after five years, to complete the publication of the results and to allow mature consideration of these so as to generate a new set of questions.At an early stage the decision was taken to publish the work as a series of annual reports in theseProceedingsrather than as a single monograph. The first report (Wainwrightet al.1979) set out the simple research design for the project and contained accounts of the 1976 survey and of the excavation of the cairn group.

This article presents an overview of the management of fresh water in the British Empire from the 1860s to the 1940s. We argue that imperial water management shaped and responded to the imperatives of diverse ecologies and topographies, contrasting political and economic agendas and, not least, different colonial societies, technologies and lay expertise. Building on existing studies, we consider the broader ecological and social effects of water management on irrigated agriculture and cities as well as water supply and drainage, with a particular focus on India and Australasia. Although imperial ideologies of improvement impelled settlement, drove resource extraction and transformed environments, we argue that at times they also diminished the availability, quality and distribution of water. Engineering projects also benefited some groups but not others. We show that normative Anglo assumptions of productive lands and watered environments were often ill-matched with colonial ecologies and water availability, in some cases prompting anxieties about the quality and quantity of water. While these anxieties encouraged further hydrological interventions, we show that they often had unexpected and undesired consequences. We introduce the concept of ‘hydro-resilience’ to demonstrate how interventions in water management diminished the quality and quantity of water in ways that impacted unevenly on peoples and ecologies across the British Empire.

It has become a truism to observe that the world faces a "water crisis." 1 Since the early 1990s, scientists and commentators have studied and debated the myriad socioeconomic, geopolitical, and ecological problems that have contributed to, and will result from, our state of "peak water." Already in some parts of the world, water consumption exceeds the amount of water that is naturally replenished each year. 2 According to the 2009 edition of The World's Water, nearly two out of three people in the world could be living under conditions of water stress in the year 2025. 3 This frightening situation, which has resulted from the (mis)management of the world's waterways, looks set to worsen over the decades ahead as climate change and other pressures take their toll. Governments, activists, and scholars have produced many potential solutions to the world's water crisis. Activist Maude Barlow in her important book The Blue Covenant argues for a global covenant on water that is centered on the premise of the inalienable human right to clean water. Under this covenant, people and their governments would protect and conserve the world's water supplies, ensure water for those in both the global North and the global South, and seek the peaceful resolution of disputes regarding water between states. 4 Scientists Meena Palaniappan and Peter H. Gleick advocate a "soft path for water," which combines water resource management with an emphasis on efficiency, productivity, equity, and community participation. 5 Others, meanwhile, have advised governments to leave the problem

In British India and the Australian colonies, drought and famine, as well as other hazards, were challenges facing local and metropolitan meteorologists. In this article, I examine the colonial and environmental contexts that animated the studies of both Indian and Australian scientists and the meteorological futures they sought to realise. Colonial scientists in India and Australia were eager to develop means of seasonal weather prediction that could aid the advancement of Empire underway in their respective continents. As this article shows, meteorologists in both places understood that the climate knowledge emerging on each side of the east Indian Ocean could be mutually beneficial in related ways. Their vast continental scales, imperial bonds, geographic orientation and telegraphic connection made them worthy partners in colonial efforts to discern and predict weather patterns, while contributing to the wider field of meteorological science. The threat to colonial security and prosperity that drought and famine posed helped to thicken the bonds between these reaches of the empire, as their meteorologists sought to impose their territorial logic of the skies above.

Long regarded for its reliable winter rainfall, the Southwest region of Western Australia was beset by unexpected dry conditions in the early 1970s whose persistence was baffling. The gradual growth of scientific interest in the region's rainfall, as this article contends, was strongly influenced by political, social, and economic concerns about the challenges posed by drought and climate change. The experience of rainfall decline coincided with international scientific and political interest in the global climate and the perception that it was deviating from its "normal" state. Indeed, this extended "dry" provided an Australian link to international concerns regarding anthropogenic global warming. This article argues that the historical, political, and economic importance of the Southwest's agricultural industries has led policy makers and researchers to perceive the region's changing climatic conditions as pathological and in need of diagnosis.