State and irrigation: archeological and textual evidence of water management in late Bronze Age China

Abstract

Ancient China remains an important case to investigate the relationship between statecraft development and 'total power'. While important economic and social developments were achieved in the late Neolithic, it was not until the late Bronze Age (first millennium BC) that state-run irrigation systems began to be built. Construction of large-scale irrigation projects, along with walls and defensive facilities, became vital to regional states who were frequently involved in chaotic warfare and desperate to increase food production to feed the growing population. Some of the irrigation infrastructures were brought into light by recent archaeological surveys. We scrutinise fast accumulating archaeological evidence and review rich historical accounts on late Bronze Age irrigation systems. While the credibility of historical documents is often questioned, with a robust integration with archaeological data, they provide important information to understand functions and maintenance of the irrigation projects. We investigate structure and organisation of large-scale irrigation systems built and run by states and their importance to understanding dynamic trajectories to social power in late Bronze Age China. Cleverly designed based on local environmental and hydrological conditions, these projects fundamentally changed water management and farming patterns, with dramatic ecological consequences in different states. Special bureaucratic divisions were created and laws were made to further enhance the functioning of these large-scale irrigation systems. We argue that they significantly increased productivity by converting previously unoccupied land into fertile ground and pushed population threshold to a new level. A hypothesis that needs to be tested in further archaeological research.

Applying ICOMOS-IFLA Principles for the Conservation, Management and Reuse of a Historical Hydraulic System: The No-Ras Qanat in North-Western Iran

“…The access to water resources contributed to shaping and influencing decision-making from the earliest hunter-gather groups to 21st century countries [1]. Moreover, the first strategies for water manipulation for irrigation purposes, navigation and delimitation of borders emerged as early as the Bronze Age in different regions of the world, including the Near East [2,3], South America [4,5], India [6,7], China [8,9] and Europe [10,11], confirming its paramount significance from small-scale aspects of everyday life up to national scale supply by governmental bodies.…”