PhD candidate

The Political Ecology of Water: an Archaeology of the Qanāt Landscape in Varāmīn, Iran

The agricultural plain of Varāmīn lies southeast of Tehrān, Iran. It has been an important agricultural region at least since the 9^th c. CE and  provides and has provided significant amounts of agricultural produce to the ever-expanding city of Tehrān. Throughout the centuries this high agricultural production was possible through the waters of the river Jājrud, but also especially through a vast network of more than 200 qanāt lines (underground tunnels connecting an aquifer with agricultural fields) running throughout the plain, providing a constant supply of water and allowing stable expanding agriculture. Since the 1940s, the plain’s qanāt network has degraded, both due to political decisions (such as a failed land reform) as well as due to overexploitation of the water supply through motorized deep wells. Climate change severely affected and affects the plain and its water resources.

My project maps these lines through a combination of aerial photography, satellite imagery and historical sources. This mapping is combined with settlement data both from historical sources as well as archaeological survey to reconstruct the landscape of the plain, especially from the Safavid to the Modern era. Through the combination of different sources, I can reconstruct the plain at different stages in time. Especially during the Qājār era, there are plenty of interlocking sources which allow a detailed reconstruction.

Qanāt lines are part of the means of production and their role in structuring socio-economic relations is one of the questions I investigate. The theoretical framework for my project is Political Ecology, as it investigates changing natural, political and economic processes and policies, their influence on landscapes and systems, the exchange between a population and its environment and how all these dynamics relate to questions of inequality as well as the decay of systems. Thus, questions of class conflicts, cooperation, heterarchy, access to and benefit from these means of production are all interrelated and can be analysed through the lens of political ecology.

The PhD project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Bernbeck and Prof. Dr. Wiebke Bebermeier.

For further information, please check https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/FabianSarga and https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3470-4283