Cultivating and Stewarding a Community of “Water People”
Stewardship, then, is the dialogue we have with stakeholders about their lived experiences with the same things we are studying, developing shared language and concepts, and incorporating that knowledge into our future research and outreach activities. Over time, we all see ourselves as Water People.
Community Connections over Water
A Lake with a Crossing in a Sandy Place
A few months ago, it was a typical day at work for me. I was tasked with producing a basic map graphic for an outreach brochure—nothing extraordinary. I sent off the completed graphic and moved on to another project. The next day, our local watershed partner replied to my email and asked me to “add the reservation communities of Little Rock and Ponemah to the map.”
Strong Relationships Result in Conservation Action
In southeast Minnesota, we are fortunate to have an abundant supply of groundwater. It is the water we drink and the source of water in local trout streams. However, the unique geology of this region makes it vulnerable to contamination. A complex network of cracks, open channels, and caves below the surface provides a quick and direct path for surface water to reach groundwater. As water travels over the landscape it can carry contaminants such as bacteria, pesticides, fertilizers and road salt underground.
An Archaeologist Writes against the Anthropocene
Much of what archaeologists do is study how humans adapt to the environment. After Gordon Willey’s (1953) groundbreaking investigation into the entire history of occupation of a small valley in Peru, understanding how humans lived in and modified their environment became commonplace. Indeed, the “New Archeology” that took the American academy by storm in the 1960s and strove to make the discipline more scientific made human-environment interactions and the understanding of human-environmental relations one of its central goals…
Water and the Preclassic Maya at El Tintal, Petén, Guatemala
As part of the 1931 Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Uaxactun expedition, geologist C.W. Cooke (1931: 286) noted, “If the bajos were restored to their former condition, the Petén would be a region of many beautiful lakes. Travel in it would be easy, for one could go from place to place by boat, with only short journeys overland, from one lake to another, across country that offers little impediment to travel at any season.” These bajos mentioned by Cooke, low-lying swampy areas prone to flooding, are spread throughout most of the northern lowlands of Petén, Guatemala, characterizing the region with seasonal and perennial wetland systems.
Ethnography and Archaeology of Water in the Maya Lowlands
Procuring potable water is an important factor for daily life in the semitropics, especially for contemporary populations in rural Guatemala. Seasonal subsistence practices are crucial for survival, especially regarding agriculture, droughts, and flooding. This article focuses on the Salinas de los Nueve Cerros region in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala to highlight contemporary land-use practices among the Q’eqchi’ Maya, their adaptations to flooding, droughts, and uses of different water resources.
Libraries Burning
The impact of climate change on archaeological and heritage sites in the Arctic region is devastating. New techniques of research and analysis are providing increasingly rich data about the long history of humans in the environment. Just as the value of these sites is being recognized more fully, the sites themselves are being destroyed by thawing permafrost, rising sea levels, and increasingly violent storms. Nowhere is this being felt more intensely than in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet (Hoag 2019).
Desert River Sea is a Vibrant, Compelling Tour of the Kimberley
For the past century, the curator has been the deciding factor in what is shown by museums and galleries, reassuring audiences of the importance of what they are seeing. While acknowledging other commercial and audience drivers, the centrality of curatorial decision-making has been sacrosanct.
But when the curatorial team from the Art Gallery of Western Australia embarked on an epic quest to document the art of the Kimberley region in the state’s north west, they abandoned this idea of a single authorial voice in favor of a new model of partnership and exchange.