About the Book
Qanats are ubiquitous, yet unseen, and a clever way to create streams where none exist in nature. For 3,000 years, they have made life possible in impossible places and still sustain life and livelihoods in many countries today. After 30 years of field research, Dale Lightfoot provides the first comprehensive study of the qanat and sheds new light on their unique locations and distribution, their origins and history, their ecology, current status and use.
Qanats are remarkably engineered underground aqueducts, using gravity to bring water to villages and towns where reliable flowing surface water is scarce or absent. Although an ancient technology, more than 46,000 of them still flow around the world today, with their sustainable nature making them a focus of renewed interest.
Richly illustrated with images and a series of original maps, this is the most complete record to date of the locations and distribution of qanats worldwide, including examples from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Central Asia, China, India, Mexico and South America.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgements
The Tradition and Global Diffusion of Qanats
Chapter 1: Form and Function of Qanats
Chapter 2: Construction and Distribution of Qanats
Chapter 3: Origins and Global History of Qanats
The Regional Geography of Qanats
Chapter 4: Iran: The Mother Lode
Chapter 5: Central and South Asia
Chapter 6: Eastward Passages: China, Korea, Japan
Chapter 7: The Arabian Peninsula
Chapter 8: Iraq
Chapter 9: Turkey and the Caucasus
Chapter 10: Syria and the Levant
Chapter 11: North Africa
Chapter 12: The Qanats of Europe
Chapter 13: The Chain Wells of Cyprus
Chapter 14: Underground Aqueducts in the Canary Islands
Chapter 15: To the New World
Completing the Story and the View Ahead
Chapter 16: Refining the Picture: Dating and Visualizing Qanats
Chapter 17: The Restoration and Future of Qanats
Notes
References
About the Author :
Dale R. Lightfoot is an American geographer, academic and researcher. He is Professor Emeritus of Geography and a former Fulbright Program Advisor at Oklahoma State University, USA.
Review :
This book gives us a multidimensional insight into the ancient technique of qanat. “Qanat: Stream of Wells” is an invaluable and thorough report that clearly shows how qanats could create a special cultural landscape that is the manifestation of millennia of human adaptations to a changing environment. The encyclopaedic nature of this book, which encompasses a wide range of qanat-related subjects across time and place, never detracts from its value as an analytical study that can change our current perception of qanats. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to understand qanats in a global context and from a holistic perspective.
Supported by exhaustive data, maps and diagrams, Lightfoot’s study answers a felt need for a multi-disciplinary exploration of historic water management wherein hydrology, geography, landscape studies and social history converge to articulate patterns of human sustainability, their past and their future.
Thirty years of hot and dusty fieldwork in arid lands around the world, much of it in countries now hostile to outsiders, has resulted in the most thorough volume ever written on qanats. These chain-well and tunnel features—many built recently, some excavated more than 3,000 years ago—transport(ed) irrigation waters from deep under mountain piedmonts to surface fields of crops kilometers away. Lightfoot has labored through archives, libraries, and museums everywhere, gleaning histories and first-hand accounts when not crawling through qanats and talking to and interviewing local builders, users, and scholars. He weaves a compelling story of human survival, ingenuity, and the transfer of ideas and technologies that crosses oceans and transcends culture and time from the Middle East to the Taklimakan, to Perú and México. Ubiquitous and nearly invisible in dry lands, and long marginalized by scholars and lay people alike, qanats now have visibility and voice, a very high visibility and a very loud voice.
Drawing from over thirty years of research and fieldwork, Lightfoot offers a truly comprehensive and groundbreaking look at qanats worldwide, spanning multiple disciplines—geography, archaeology, history, sociology, and hydrogeology. Despite its encyclopedic perspective, Lightfoot breaks away from common oversimplifications in the history of qanat technology and offers a definitive course for future scholarship on the topic. If you seek depth, breadth, and a clear lens on qanats, this pivotal study is your essential guide.
I thank Professor Dale Lightfoot for this rigorous scientific reference and the immense work he has accomplished. This book is extremely important for researchers studying qanats and traditional water management, containing the product of diligent work and extensive experience by Professor Dale Lightfoot, who traveled the world in search for these systems, met with the most significant researchers in this scientific area, and reviewed the most important research published in the field of archaeohydrology. The book provides focused and comprehensive information about qanats around the world and explains their natural and human environments, with a strong effort dedicated to studying their history and origins.
This book serves as an important academic reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students, studies human geography, socio-hydrology, human-ecology, and other interdisciplinary science that explore the relationships between humans, nature, and knowledge throughout history
This book is long awaited and thoroughly researched, documenting one of the most impressive, remarkable and ingenious feats of engineering in human history, Qanats. Despite the rapid demise and existential threats to these intriguing tunnels bringing water to the desert, some Qanats are still kept alive by its surrounding communities, as human ecosystems which inspire us to live a future life in balance with the natural world. Professor Lightfoot has managed to encompass the magnitude and spread of where we find these ancient water supply systems and their wide range of applications throughout the dry areas on the planet. This indispensable book is unique in its documentation of the uses, the encompassing cultures, societies, geographies and statuses of qanats based on long term study, fieldwork travel and the excellent expertise of Professor Lightfoot.
