Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host. In this episode, I’m speaking with landscape archaeologist Dr. Mehrnoush Soroush. Mehrnoush and I met over a decade ago when we were both graduate students at New York University, and we’ve even worked together in the field in Oman.

She’s currently at the University of Chicago, where she’s an assistant professor and director of the CAMEL Lab. Mehrnoush studies water and its relationship with people across time, but she was dissatisfied with the water narratives that she had been taught. In our conversation, she shares her work at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Shushtar in Iran.

The site is known for its extensive and impressive hydraulic system. But Mehrnoush started noticing that the story she had been told about the site didn’t really match up with what she was seeing on the ground. This catalyzed her curiosity and her future work. She starts us off with how Shushtar got on her radar and even prompted a career change.

Mehrnoush: So I was always interested in history, and once I graduated from university, I knew that I wanted to, uh, work in historical conservation and historical management. I was invited to join this project that was supposed to work on historical management of Shushtar’s water systems. Of course, being from the region, I had heard about them, but to that point, I had thought about historical and urban quarters, not anything about water particularly.

And when I joined the project, I realized that it’s… The city and these waterworks are so enmeshed. It’s hard to say where the city starts and where the waterworks begin, or which one is more important. So when I started to work on Shushtar, it’s because the big question there was when these monuments were built.

So we had some answers and anecdotes from historical books and archaeologists, but nobody had a definite answer about when they were built or who built them. But my initial thought was, if I do a PhD in architectural history, I can answer these kinds of questions. So I basically applied for this interdisciplinary program at Institute for the Study of Ancient World at New York University, where you and I met, and I applied to do an architectural history PhD.

And there, I realized that the kind of questions I have are really beyond the questions of the monuments, and they are the kind of questions that you can’t answer- Not even with archaeology, which deals with, like, individual sites and monuments, but within this kind of discipline of archaeology, which is called landscape archaeology, that looks at the relationships between humans and the environment at really broad regional scales.

Smiti: So it seems that your relationship with Shushtar goes back quite early in your academic studies. And for those of us who might not be as familiar with Shushtar, do you mind giving us a quick overview about its hydraulic system and why it’s so significant?

Mehrnoush: Um, so Shushtar today is a small town in southwestern Iran in the province of Khuzestan, which is important in many ways, but particularly for the history of water.

It is important because it’s in kind of an, uh, transition area between most of Iranian plateau, which is really a kind of high mountainous area, and Mesopotamian lowlands and the shores of the Persian Gulf. A lot of the water that comes from these mountains flows through Khuzestan and then drains to the Persian Gulf.

So for a country that is basically relatively arid or very arid, several of the main rivers, including its biggest river, which is the River Karun, actually flows in this region. And why Shushtar is important, so all of Khuzestan has agricultural potential, and the cities that r- sit right at the top of this plain, including Shushtar, have some of the highest potential.

So Shushtar sits at a point where this river, the main tributary or the main branch of this biggest river of Iran, Karun, exits the mountains of Zagros and enters the plain. So it’s full of potential. It has all of the energy, and it’s ready to be tapped. And well, of course, this potential has not gone untapped.

That’s why this little town is basically dotted with waterworks, from canals and tunnels and dams and weirs and water mills. And this is just in this town, so basically the entire town is circled with water. And on these channels you can find different water systems. And then there are also tunnels that take the water underneath the city.

And then there are, like, canals that take the water to the agricultural land that is the hinterland of the city. And there are also, of course, monuments that are in the hinterland everywhere. But the thing is, some of these monuments are really impressive And they’ve been always mentioned in historical s- sources as some of the legends of the ancient world.

Even people who had not seen them have heard of them. And of course, Shushtar has also been entangled from a academic view about how big kings and empires can tap the sources of nature, particularly water, to shape the landscape. Because of these monuments, recently in 2009, the city and its entire waterworks have been nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

On top of that, I add another layer that, again, because of this kind of water scarcity and its potential, this area is really important from the modern economic aspects and hydroelectric management, and these come into conflict with the historical preservation aspect of that, and that kind of UNESCO nomination values, right?

So you can see how this little town can be both significant and also come into a lot of, kind of tensions.

Smiti: Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely want to talk about those tensions or frictions a bit later. But you did mention UNESCO, and that was one of the first websites I started looking at when I was researching this site for this interview.

And one of the things that’s interesting here is that there is a gap. We have this idea of maybe the initial construction and the history there and what’s going on, and then there seems to have been almost radio silence on our understanding of the history for over a millennia and a half later, and then we’re in the present day.

Can you talk to us about what’s missing in some of these dominant narratives about the last millennia and a half in this system’s history?

Mehrnoush: Yeah, good point. So the UNESCO website is a really great example of how the dominant narrative is, which is all of these big waterworks were built by the great Sasanian Empire, which was, um, the greatest or the largest empire or the most powerful empire of the pre-Islamic period.

They ruled from the 4th century CE to the 7th century CE, and they were defeated during the Islamic conquest. They had an interest in this region, and it’s very likely that some of these waterworks were built during this empire. But the narrative is that this kind of entire ecosystem of waterworks was built by these kings, and then done.

We don’t hear anything. So between these kind of 700 CE and today, it’s about, like, 1400 years. If these monuments were used for 14 centuries, and imagine that these monuments are situated in a big river, so if you don’t take care of them for two years, they start to fall apart. Right. So you should– you start to ask, okay, so what about maintenance and regular upkeep?

So my first question was, what kind of non-imperial mechanisms were in place that allowed these residents to maintain these monuments? But then you immediately go to a second step and start to say, but wait, everything changes in this region over time. So the monuments can’t be used in the same way because not only people change, but also the arrangement of settlement change, the economic networks change, the spatial distribution of trade systems change, right?

So there’s no way that the same waterworks and the same infrastructure of water distribution could have been in place. And then you start to think of the next immediate level, re-engineering, repurposing, redesign of the landscape. So as I follow this question, then I start to actually see that some of the basic assumptions about even the date of the construction of some of the monuments start to fall apart.

And for example, like one of the most magnificent sites of this system is called the water mills. Um, so they– it’s like a big dam, and the waters come from a tunnel behind the dam, and then they operate a bunch of water mills, and then they jet out and gives a really impressive view, almost like waterfalls.

So they’re all attributed to the Sasanian period. And interestingly, if you read two travelers that visited the site in the 19th century, you see that the site went to a major reconstruction in the middle of 19th century. So there’s no way that these water mills were not redone when the entire bridge or dam was rebuilt.

So when you start to dig, you can see that even the basic assumptions about the construction or the evolution and the process of the development of the system changes. So this shows what I’m really interested in, that this kind of, these various forms and processes of agency and the involvement of the inhabitants of the city in shaping the, the infrastructure of water management around them.

Smiti: Gotcha. I’d, I’d love to talk a bit more about dating because you and I, we’ve both worked in Oman together, and we’ve encountered challenges with trying to understand how old water systems are there, and it seems like there are challenges as well in Shushtar. So what do we know and what don’t we know based on the evidence at hand about dating the various water systems at Shushtar?

Mehrnoush: That’s a very difficult question. I will give you a very short answer And I encourage the listeners, in two years, come back and read the book I’m submitting that has two chapters trying to explain how hard it is to actually date, uh, archaeological remains of waterworks. It’s very difficult. And the main reason is exactly discontinuity that I explain.

And it’s very hard and rare to find waterworks that were used only in a specific period of time. And most of the waterworks are also not associated with anything that is historically significant. For example, a king or a, like a big city or a big event, so that we have other kind of celebratory information, like an inscription or a document or something that records their existence.

So imagine a canal. It’s just basically like a trench dug in the earth. And as long as there’s water and as long as there are people living there and it makes sense for water to go through that path, people will keep digging up dirt. What is also really important is that even when they stop using that, this kind of waterworks change the surface of the earth.

So even if they’re not canals anymore, if the water comes and there’s a nearby site, the water still washes the surface ceramics from a site and deposits them at the bottom of that canal, right? So you might still find sherds of later periods at the bottom of a canal that is not even used in that period.

Basically, the methods that we have could give us many ways of interpreting archaeological remains. Our dating methods usually work really well for something really small. So you might go to, like, a one-hectare area at best and pick some samples and date that. But then when you kind of see an area that is, let’s say 10,000 hectare and see its water history, you can’t really sample and date every part of that, right?

So you start to have approximations and start to make guesses and start to make associations, and then your dating becomes much more kind of speculative. So I want to say that yes, it’s very hard. Dating is always a hypothesis and a proposal that should be considered the most likely scenario among The range of scenarios.

Smiti: I completely hear you. When it comes to trying to study water systems and water in the past, there’s just so much complexity and nuance that are there from the outset that for me personally, it has really trained and strengthened, I think, my approach to the past. Now, when it comes to Shushtar, you are writing a book about your work there.

So can you tell us a bit about what you hope to cover

Mehrnoush: in that? So I’m actively looking and writing about the history of waterworks. The goal is to actually see the continuity of engagement with construction and modification and engineering and adaptation of these sites all the way into the modern period.

I realized there’s so much ambiguity about how archaeologists actually understand or date or reconstruct the history of waterworks, so I thought that there might be a need for kind of elaboration of that. So I have chapters that try to really simplify and clarify the common methodological approaches in the field, in landscape archaeology, and explaining why we use these methods, what are the advantages of them, and what are the problems with them.

I kind of take a critical, uh, view about, um, the kind of the conceptual frameworks in which the history of water has been understood in archaeology and anthropology, and my argument is that mostly anthropologists and archaeologists have been interested in the relationship between waterworks and state formation.

So it’s an invitation about how we can expand these topics into other topics, including and specifically into the non-imperial agents in many levels.

Smiti: Well, I’m looking forward to the book. So let’s transition a bit. You’ve alluded to something before about the fact that people are still using these systems.

How do you approach the relationship of the past and present as you make sense of this site for yourself?

Mehrnoush: I try to come with a sense of curiosity, and by peeling off the most obvious recent past evidence and then moving to what I can tell from the past, which is maybe inefficient in the beginning.

Sometimes when I collaborate, people get frustrated that like, “Why you’re not targeting this particular period that we are supposed to study?” And I’m like, but I don’t have any evidence that this is d- related to this particular period. I think archaeologists, especially landscape archaeologists, can be pretty effective in kind of mapping everything and being able to see where the modern settlements are, where the relatively recent settlements are, and try to figure out what are the things that could have been also used in recent past, and then take those things as the infrastructure that are probably made in collaboration between present, recent past, and ancient past, rather than as something that is built in the ancient past and seeing the local communities or the recent past as almost like just free riders of the ancient past.

This is how I feel like communities are seen when they are in an ancient landscape, and that’s something that I want to avoid. Do, do you wanna elaborate more? So this problem is not exclusive to Shushtar. For example, I’m moving on to study qanat landscape, which is a system of subterranean tunnels that were very common across arid environments, including in Oman.

And there’s a lot of literature about how they might have started in kinda 1000 BC, and we know that they were heavily used in this early Islamic period about probably 700 to 1000, 1100 CE. And of course, I’m really interested in that, but also equally they were used in 1600 CE, and they’re still used today.

So when I go to a landscape in Oman and I see these oases, the same oasis uses this qanat landscape. I cannot begin any study of the Iron Age, like 1000 BC or Islamic period qanats, before understanding what these people were doing in 1600 BCE with qanats or the modern periods. I do not see myself able to make assumptions about ability or the inability or the capabilities of the modern periods or medieval periods of shaping the landscape so I can rule out what is not Islamic and then move on to just examine the Islamic period or the Iron Age period.

I really need to understand the whole thing and the whole practices, and I think this is how, for example, you in your practice think about ethnoarchaeobotany, right? Before s- even starting to shape a research program, I really need to understand, uh, spend like maybe a season or two really understanding all of the range of the practices.

So this is how I approach it, and I really want to foreground all of the periods and all of the communities and see all of them capable of equally shaping the environments around them And not kind of pre-judging one group over the other when I see the historical processes of landscape formation.

Smiti: Absolutely. And I think our approaches are quite similar. And you did mention a bit about my approach in Oman, so I wanted to quickly elaborate on that for people who might not know. In my doctoral studies, it was really important for me to do what’s called ethnoarchaeology. And basically, that’s es- essentially ethnography for archaeologists.

And this field has faced some controversy because in some instances, people might interpret what we’re doing as saying like, “Okay, well, if we study people in the modern present and what they’re doing with, let’s say, agriculture, then we can make assumptions about the past.” And that is problematic, absolutely.

But from my point of view, I wanted to know what was happening in the modern present as it related to water and agriculture, number one, because I think it is important to document, but also understand as a researcher, especially as a researcher who is not from that region, who didn’t grow up there, so maybe doesn’t have…

Not even maybe, but definitely has no baseline knowledge- Exactly … on how to farm in, like, arid regions or what water might mean and how that’s managed. So for me, the point of doing ethnoarchaeology was not so much like, “Hmm, let me see if I can make any connections to the past.” You know, if that happened, great, but it was more so to understand as a researcher what was happening now, and also to document and honor the people who were doing these practices in these environments that I was trying to understand.

So just wanted to clarify that a bit. But, you know, with all this research, it does take time, money, and energy, so you have to often prioritize what aspects you’re gonna do, and ethnoarchaeology might not make it into everyone’s program. But I am curious, if you had unlimited time, money, access, what would you work on next?

Mehrnoush: Well, there are a lot of things I wanted to work on. And I would tell you that the most thing you need more than time and resources is great people. I wish I could had 20 smart graduate students. That I would get more than anything else, because if you had the 20 graduate students, you could have the best thinking lab ever.

But one of the things I would wish to do, and I’m still trying to do, is to somehow map all of the areas of canal irrigation The way that I did deep mapping of Shushtar, but imagine I do that for all of Khuzestan and all of Mesopotamia and all of Syria, Lebanon. And then I do the mapping of the zones of qanat, uh, irrigation for all of the Iranian plateaus, Central Asia.

And then at the same time have kind of geomorphologists and geologists help me map the surface waters, the groundwater levels across these areas, and the late Holocene changes of these places. So I could see how the recent developments of kind of polities and networks and urbanism corresponds or correlates to the affordances of water management in general.

I’m not saying that everything’s shaped by water management, but I think this is– would be a hugely amazing environmental research infrastructure for all of the discipline to start seeing where the kind of the climatic aspects of where their sociopolitical history fits. So they don’t just see the kind of, oh, the empires came, and then these two fight, and then everything collapsed.

But when they see, like, some kind of urban center emerges there, they could see water management aspect. What are the agricultural affordances of that? How that place fits into the networks of trade and, um, kind of supply of water across this arid belt. So I really wish I could build something like that for the area from, like, let’s say Central Asia to at least, like, Mediterranean.

That’s crazy, but that’s a dream.

Smiti: Hey, if anyone can do it,

I think it could be you. And yes, it does sound incredibly complex. But, you know, hearing your connection and story with Shushtar, it fits your story and your journey because Shushtar, incredibly complex. So you’ve been working on incredibly complex things from the beginning.

But I’m wondering, what has working on Shushtar meant to you personally?

Mehrnoush: The most important aspect for me is a way to anchor me into my roots, really, and having a way for me to connect my kind of academic learning and engagement with global scholarship to my local roots and what I care about as an Iranian person, as a person from the Middle East, and where I can bring my own perspective, my own feelings, my own vision.

So I would think working on the question of Shushtar, like an anchoring place, like as a mental gym where I can bring my learning, my new ways of thinking, my practices, my my new me into reshaping my thinking around a really complicated problems.

Smiti: And as we wrap up our conversation about Shushtar, what do you hope listeners take away from what we’ve discussed today?

Mehrnoush: First of all, well, I like them to see whatever they want to see, but I also want them to see the complexity of these kind of stories of human-environment interaction, how difficult it is to kind of navigate the questions of the past. So they don’t really take simple stories or simple answers easily.

When I talk to people about my work, what I also like to talk to them about is some kind of a stepping away from some kind of nostalgia for ancient technologies. Oh my God, this site was amazing. They had this… How they build these monuments, and somehow they feel like that we lost this technological perspective, and there’s a sense of kind of yearning for going back at the time where we could make all these technologies.

I don’t think our problem is technology. The thing that we should learn from these times is the kind of problems they had, the problems of their environment. The things that we can relate to is how they thought about managing their environment, managing their expectations, balancing the individual consumptions with whatever is available in the environment, uh, or managing the needs and comforts with survival and things like that.

The other thing is kind of this nostalgia about this great ancient empire’s time, and after that, everything fell apart. I don’t think that’s the true. If you go to something like a complete ruin of an ancient palace, like a Persepolis, yes, that’s comes from the time of a great empire that built this palace coming from resources such as taxes and tribute, but also conquests and pillage, like any empire.

And they built this, and then it was destroyed, and then we received the ruin of that. But if you go to a living landscape like Shushtar, this is not really a heritage of an empire. It’s like a heritage of 20 centuries of the history of life in this region with each generation adding something to that.

Smiti: My biggest takeaway from this conversation is when we take the time to explore the life of structures beyond its initial construction, we can learn a lot about people both in the past and present. If you’d like to follow Mehrnoush’s work, you can find her latest publications on her Academia page.

You’ll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to a full transcript of this episode. And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn more about Mehrnoush’s advocacy for Iran’s people and cultural heritage amidst this war, she shares that and more in a Patreon exclusive video. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content.

If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Dr. Mehrnoush Soroush: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Brooke Norton: Production Support

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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