Elixir: A History of Water and Humans

A Faculty Project Course - Best Professors Teaching the World

Water. It caresses and comforts us, provides sustenance and refreshment, is something that humanity has cherished since the beginning of history, and means something different to everyone else. Yet the historical facts and information about water remains little known.

Water tells the story of changing human relationships with water over the past 10,000 years and tries to answer some basic questions:

• How have human attitudes to water changed since people first began to manage their water supplies?
• What major events in the past have defined our present relationship to water, not as something revered, but treated as an anonymous commodity?
• Why are we now facing a global water crisis and what are prospects for the future?

This is the story of gravity and human ingenuity, of irrigation and aqueducts, of humble farming villages, ancient cities, and the rise and fall of civilizations. We draw on archaeology and hydrology, on anthropology and ancient oral traditions, on classical literature and Islamic agriculture—on a broad array of scientific inquiries in many languages and in all parts of the world.

Taking this course will make you look at water in an entirely new way.

Over 16 lectures and 4 hours of content!

I was born in England and trained in archaeology and anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge (BA (Honors) 1959, MA 1962, PhD 1964). From 1959 to 1965, I served as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where I was deeply involved in museum work and monument conservation. I also excavated a series of 1000-year-old farming villages in the southern part of the country and was also deeply involved in the development of multidisciplinary African history. This experience gave me a lasting interest in writing about archaeology for general audiences. This was an exciting time to be doing African archaeology, as we were concerned both with basic fieldwork as well as using archaeology for teaching history in schools and at the new University of Zambia. In other words, we had to take archaeology out of the ivory tower of academia and make it relevant to a newly independent African nation.