Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind [Hardcover]

Brian Fagan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 7, 2011

Elixir spans five millennia, from ancient Mesopotamia to the parched present of the Sun Belt. As Brian Fagan shows, every human society has been shaped by its relationship toour most essential resource. Fagan's sweeping narrative moves across the world, from ancient Greece and Rome, whose mighty aqueducts still supply modern cities, to China, where emperors marshaled armies of laborers in a centuries-long struggle to tame powerful rivers. He sets out three ages of water: In the first age, lasting thousands of years, water was scarce or at best unpredictable-so precious that it became sacred in almost every culture.

By the time of the Industrial Revolution, human ingenuity had made water flow even in the most arid landscapes.This was the second age: water was no longer a mystical force to be worshipped and husbanded, but a commodity to be exploited. The American desert glittered with swimming pools- with little regard for sustainability. Today, we are entering a third age of water: As the earth's population approaches nine billion and ancient aquifers run dry,we will have to learn once again to show humility, even reverence, for this vital liquid. To solve the water crises of the future, we may need to adapt the water ethos of our ancestors.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Five thousand years of rising and falling civilizations flow through Fagan's sweeping survey of man's ability to harness water. From the stirrings of agricultural settlements in the Euphrates Valley to the canny manipulation that sent the Owens River's flow to a tiny California town called Los Angeles at the start of the 20th century, Fagan (The Great Warming), an archeologist, digs down into our relationship to water sources, pointing out that "water is capricious and powerful, far more masterful than the humans and animals that depend on it." However, this survey veers unevenly, offering vivid descriptions of the hazards of channeling water in prehistoric northern Iraq, of water distribution in traditional Balinese governance structures, of Middle Eastern irrigation engineering that becomes mired in measurements and dimensions. Fagan prompts an appreciation of water's centrality to civilization and of human ingenuity, but his topic is so broad and his treatment so dry that his conclusion—a call for a profound realignment of an increasingly urban world with its dwindling water supplies—lacks the impact it deserves. (June)
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Review

Winner of the 2013 Felicia A. Holton Book Award, given annually to a writer who, through a major work of non-fiction, represents the importance and excitement of archaeology to the general public, granted by the Archaeological Institute of America

"As always with Mr. Fagan’s work, the range is dazzling, the focus sharp and the pictures vivid...The author holds us with his glittering eye, as he conjures a vision of a world with water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."—Wall Street Journal

 

“Juxtaposes ancient and contemporary cultures’ veneration of water with the current commodification of it …Fagan is a passionate and lively writer.”—Los Angeles Times

 

"… examines societies’ relationships with water since ancient times, and describes how the advance of technology has led to unsustainable management and depletion of our most valuable resource."—Chronicle of Higher Education

 

“It is hard to imagine industrial societies regaining some sense of water as sacred. The best we might hope for in the near term is a new-found respect for water. Reading Fagan’s book is an enjoyable way of gaining that respect, by taking a tour through the hard-won lessons of the past.”—Nature Climate Change

 

“Eye-opening….making sense of water and its place in the development of civilization....[Fagan] understands how the ancients struggled with changing climate and that what matters has always been the fluctuating availability of water, rather than shifting temperatures. That is an important lesson for us now.”—Washington Post

“Supplying intriguing historical background, Fagan well informs those pondering freshwater’s role in contemporary environmental problems.”—Booklist

“Important and, from a New York Times best-selling author, accessible to all.”—Library Journal

"Fagan prompts an appreciation of water's centrality to civilization and of human ingenuity."—Publishers Weekly

 

"A rewarding survey of water’s role in history and contemporary politics alike."—Kirkus

 

“Not just a fascinating book, but also an important one… [a] marvelous history… Don't take water or Elixir for granted. Give this important book a read—and then maybe send a copy to your local representative or senator.”—Mother Nature Network

 

“At a time of increasing threats of regional ‘water wars,’ Elixir provides crucial temporal depth and worldwide scope to an emerging water scarcity crisis that we can no longer ignore. Fagan’s detailed examination of past use and abuse of water—highlighted by personal experience—makes his book not only a major source on the subject but, as usual, enjoyable reading.”—R. Gwinn Vivian, curator emeritus of archaeology, Arizona State Museum, author of The Chaco Handbook

 

"[Fagan] is a beguiling writer and his lessons from global experience are both refreshing and sobering."—Daily Express (UK)

 

"A comprehensive look at the history of water control… there are places on the earth today where our water control systems are breaking down, and most of us don't yet recognize how devastating the effects of that will be. Elixir helps that realization… This book is one of the best pop science books I've read in a long time…there is much to reread and contemplate."—About.com

 

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press; First US Edition edition (June 7, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 160819003X
• ISBN-13: 978-1608190034
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #134,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Fagan was born in England and studied archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum, Zambia, from 1959-1965. During six years in Zambia and one in East Africa, he was deeply involved in fieldwork on multidisciplinary African history and in monuments conservation. He came to the United States in 1966 and was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1967 to 2004, when he became Emeritus.
Since coming to Santa Barbara, Brian has specialized in communicating archaeology to general audiences through lecturing, writing, and other media. He is regarded as one of the world's leading archaeological and historical writers and is widely respected popular lecturer about the past. His many books include three volumes for the National Geographic Society, including the bestselling Adventure of Archaeology. Other works include The Rape of the Nile, a classic history of archaeologists and tourists along the Nile, and four books on ancient climate change and human societies, Floods, Famines, and Emperors (on El Niños), The Little Ice Age, and The Long Summer, an account of warming and humanity since the Great Ice Age. His most recent climatic work describes the Medieval Warm Period: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. His other books include Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society and Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World and Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age gave birth to the First Modern Humans. His recently published Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind extends his climatic research to the most vital of all resources for humanity.
Brian has been sailing since he was eight years old and learnt his cruising in the English Channel and North Sea. He has sailed thousands of miles in European waters, across the Atlantic, and in the Pacific. He is author of the Cruising Guide to Central and Southern California, which has been a widely used set of sailing directions since 1979. An ardent bicyclist, he lives in Santa Barbara with his life Lesley and daughter Ana.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Water as Common Thread for World History June 7, 2011

By Ken Wright

Format:Hardcover

Brian Fagan has triumphed once again with his tracking of water use and practices over a long period of mankind. In Elixir, he has used his storytelling genius to tie the development of civilizations and empires far and wide to their water-use management, all in an enjoyable, interesting, and intellectual manner. For me, it will also serve as a reliable reference book for my paleohydrologic research on ancient peoples. It is a presentation of important aspects of world history using water as a common thread.

Fagan weaves together the three broad themes of gravity flow, the relationship of ritual use of water and water management, and the role of technology versus sustainability. Fagan's message about living within one's hydrological means is an important one.
Fagan's success as a great storyteller has been proven with more than two dozen books that combine his detailed knowledge of anthropology with analysis of how and why things happened. He begins Chapter 2 by taking us back some 12,000 years to the Euphrates Valley, with his story of a young girl and her mother discovering the marvel of gravity flow of water, and then goes on to a delicate story of water use near Petra, at Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan.

I learned a lot from Fagan on the ancient Salt River water use in the Phoenix, Arizona area by the Hohokam people and how most of the remnants of their considerable irrigation works there have been lost to a sprawling metropolis.
Reading about the Nile and the Egyptian civilization that relied on this great river was enjoyable. Fagan also describes in detail how groundwater was captured and developed by the use of qanats.... He presents details on how the qanats were built and operated, probably first by farmers in northwest Iran, and likely some 3,000 years ago.

Greek water history in Chapter 9 is laid out in terms of storm drainage, aqueducts, use of tunnels, and water-lifting devices along with their development and management of water from the earliest days to the time of Alexander the Great and then the Romans.
Fagan's picture of Roman innovations using technology is fascinating and contains much detail, ranging from Pompeii to Tunisia, Libya, and Rome. His water-oriented description of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is special in many ways because the method of water management at this great temple complex has long been argued. Fagan tells the story of Angkor Wat water development and its use in clear, understandable language up until its collapse in 1431.

No story of water and humankind would be complete without including ancient China. Sure enough, Fagan includes China.
Elixer is a good book for all types of readers, including engineers, historians, anthropologists and high-schoolers. They will learn from a master how civilizations developed and how water made them happen. Read more ›

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars detailed stories of ancient water management -- sustainable (and NOT!) November 1, 2011

By David Zetland

Format:Hardcover

Brian Fagan is a storyteller and showman, in person. His book, Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, does not deliver the same wonder, mystique and humor.* That's perhaps an impossible thing to ask (perhaps the same can be said of my book), but it does give you an idea of the gap that may exist between what we want to read and what we are given to read.

This 350 pp book tells many stories of how people from long-forgotten civilizations managed their water. Nearly all of it takes place before the Industrial Revolution brought powered pumps to the movement of water. What we get, then, are descriptions of how water was managed in "the age of gravity," when water sustainability was a given but human sustainability was not.

Let me drop in this observation at the start: Elixir tells a different story from Solomon's Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. Solomon narrates the development of water, politics and economics across many cultures. Fagan describes how different civilizations managed their water, without spending too much time tracing impacts and trends. In my notes, I wrote that "Solomon traces grandiose projects across large areas" while "Fagan observes the details of small and (usually) sustainable solutions to local problems."

At least, that's my feeling after reading through it, but that feeling may be affected by the "too many notes" problem: I cannot keep track of so many kings, canal dimensions, and geographies without seeing some patterns. Maybe they were there, but they didn't grab me.

But let's get to some detailed comments:

Fagan provides a deep description of why farmers may be conservative.... They have, after all, been trying to control water and grow food for hundreds of generations. We have to respect their conservatism as the result of protecting success amidst multiple opportunities for failure.
Fagan, as an archeologist, has a different view that emphasizes the physical remnants of past civilizations over their (soft, eroded, washed away) cultural institutions. It's hard to reconstruct a legal or economic system from a culture whose language was never written down.
I was very pleased to get a deeper description of the "fall" of Sumeria, which was more about drought than salt (given an extensive -- over extensive? -- irrigation system).
Slave labor is very handy when you want to dig canals and build dams!
One of the more interesting cultural vignettes comes from Fagan's own experience in Tanzania, where the assembled villagers argue and fight over who's to get what share of the water. I found the description of this process -- and the resulting settlement -- to be a compelling observation on the balancing act that takes place over and over in a community where nobody is a winner for long and everyone's voice has a place. In the end, someone gets the water. The tricky part is that everyone needs to accept that fact -- for now.
At the end of Chapter 4, Fagan claims that the Hohokam (of Africa) would be horrified by the water consumption of Phoenix, but I am not so sure. If anything, Elixir provides ample evidence of people pushing supplies to the limit (to the margin), subject to their technology. They are no wiser than us; they merely lacked centrifugal pumps!
Chapter 8 delivers an excellent example: Rulers of the Sassanian empire (220 CE to 650 CE) were able to build huge irrigation works in today's Iraq and Iran, but their push for economies of scale in producing grains undermined the diversification that had protected earlier farmers from over-reliance on a single food source. When instability (and Islam) arrived, the Sassanians fell.
I enjoyed the detailed description of Roman water distribution, especially the observation that outbound pipes from the castellum at the end of an aqueduct were at different levels. The lowest level went to fountains for drinking water. Then came baths and theatres. At the highest level -- and first to get cut if water levels dropped -- were private residences.
Such an equitable system didn't keep rich people from building their own aqueducts, pipes to castella, or punching holes in pipes to bring water to their houses!
I also enjoyed the tale of Chen Hongmou (1696-1771), a Chinese official who understood that investment today would lead to returns tomorrow -- and who also understood that villages should pay for part of the cost of improvements that would soon make them rich.
p 291: "on the day of resurrection, Allah would ignore those who possessed surplus water and withheld it from travelers." This gives you an idea of the moral and legal foundations of the wondrous water works that Muslims constructed across North Africa, Spain and the Middle East.
These skills, on the other hand, were strained by the adoption of water thirsty crops (cotton, sugar) that strained local water supplies -- a problem that persists today in many arid areas.

Fagan ends with an eloquent plea for local sustainability (p. 347):

Humans have managed water successfully for thousands of years... it is the simple and ingenious that often works best -- local water schemes, decisions about sharing and management made by kin, family and small communities. These experiences also teach us that self-sustainability is attainable... Only one thing is certain: Descartes was wrong. We will never master the earth.

Bottom Line: I give this book FOUR stars for its interesting description of "the way it was" and "the way it fell apart" across the centuries. Elixir provides useful context while we ponder the difference between "sustainable" and "imperial overreach."
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* I asked Brian about the title. He said it was not his idea. I am particularly bothered by books that do not match their covers, and "Elixir" denotes a mystique absent from the book. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Paleoclimatology, anthropology, and archeology with a message to modern humankind July 12, 2011

By Atheen M. Wilson TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

"Elixir" is one of the many books by Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations, that deals with paleoclimate and its effects through history on human societies. In this instance he looks specifically at water and its uses by human beings, both modern and ancient, of various technological levels. As in his book The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, he notes that the more technologically innovative the society and the more wedded to agriculture it is, the more vulnerable it is to sudden, long term and extreme climate changes. He cites world wide examples, some of them also described in "The Great Warming," to illustrate his point.

For the most part it would appear that higher technological societies are a victim of their own success. By divorcing themselves from the transhumanance of hunter-gather societies and thereby from the natural tendency toward smaller populations, the settled groups became subject to the upwardly spiraling demands of increased population, to diseases arising from crowding and from living close to herd animals, and to episodic malnutrition during climatic downturns.... The author--and others writing on the topic of early agriculture--suggest that far from being a superior lifestyle to that of the hunter-gather, farming as a way of life tended to anchor individuals to a location near water and decent soil, reducing the surrounding abundance of wild plants and animals by a continued need for land. He also noted that while the benefits of society accrued to a few elite individuals, it was often not the primary producers who benefited from surpluses. Thus by subjecting land to management, people subjected themselves to management and ultimately to a far less satisfying life; that fact continues into our own times.

In gradually worsening climate, those having invested ever more time, energy and materials into a location were loathed to leave it. Furthermore, the damage that agricultural pursuits wrecked on the natural environment by over exploitation meant that there were fewer emergency food sources during hard times and more people making demands on what there was. Given that increased population pressure ensured that even the less desirable property was harnessed to feed the increased number of mouths and at further and further distances from the core development, when transhumanance became necessary, there were often people already in the region where a migratory people might go. Unless the various groups had participated in some form of reciprocal helping strategie, as they may have done among some of the early societies of the American Southwest, (David E. Stuart describes some of these strategies and how some may have failed because of drought and water shortage in his book, Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place) the migrating people may not have been welcome, and war may have ensued. (My little short story, The Tale of Little Crane: A Fairy Tale for All Ages is a parable based on this idea.) The history of the Ancient Near East is rife with stories of migratory people living in marginal regions suddenly overwhelming settled society during periods of climate change. (The author describes this as a "pump" phenomenon in this book and in The Great Warming.) In some regions like the Maya Yucatan, the drought may have been so widespread that there were no close places to which to migrate. (Richardson Gill describes this in great detail in his book The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death).

It was interesting, to read the author's take on great droughts, especially that of the Maya penninsula, since he is disinclined to see a "migration" of people and wholesale death of large numbers in a drought ridden region. (Richardson Gill's work on the subject makes very grim reading, though his work is also very extensive in its discussion on the effects of global climate change.) Rather he sees individual families as deciding to leave the area, and moving to other locations, probably to relatives or reciprocal help groups, long before the duration of the drought has taken its toll.

Along the lines of the "fitness landscape" of the Santa Fe Institute in its very interesting discussion of The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, those with less desirable land--i.e. lower on the peak of fitness--would be the first to abandon it, having less to lose by moving across a possibly bleak landscape to another peak. Those in a better place to ride out the drought and with a great deal to lose--i.e. those at the peak of the fitness landscape--would remain until the drought proved an agricultural life to be unsustainable irrespective of the human investment. These people would either leave or die. In either case, the culture to which their control of resources had given rise would certainly go extinct. Dr. Fagan discribes a number of these episodes including the Moche and some of the dynasties of China and Southeast Asia.

It would appear that the concept of "meme," (The Meme Machine (Popular Science), is very applicable here. The "idea" of farming spread widely, and while the immediate consequences might have been positive, the ultimate outcomes were often not. The meme, like the gene however, is oblivious to the wellbeing and happiness of the carrier; it just mindlessly promotes its own replication. While there is much debate about the usefulness of the meme concept, it certainly seems applicable in this instance. The lifestyle to which the human dedication to agriculture has given rise is certainly far more convenient--for those at the top of the heap anyway--even if not necessarily happier than living a life of constant movement in search of food. As the author points out, however, it also leads us further and further out on a limb of unsustainability that may lead to a major disaster in the not too distant future!

Just as in his book on the Chaco culture, Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society, Dr. Fagan notes that climate can change abruptly and can leave a high risk population with few alternatives. He seems to extol the water management skills of the simpler cultures that make use of gravity alone for their needs. He notes that gradually mechanizing and enlarging society's demands and forcing nature to give up its water supplies beyond its abilities to recharge them, has brought many civilizations to extinction. The reader is left in no doubt that this applies to the demands of our own world; the entire last chapter, "Mastery?" is dedicated to examples of modern societies blindly pushing nature to its limits. Like Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water, by Philip Ball, there are a number of warnings about damage to non-renewable water sources and about the future changes that global warming may bring to even those resources that have not been stretched to the limits by human demands. As he points out, water may be the next "oil" crisis. It is undoubtely in our best interests to pay attention to that fact, but given that not everyone is on the same page and that many vested interests have reasons to prevent any changes, it seems unlikely that we will be able to avoid these perils. Read more ›