DAROJI VALLEY: LANDSCAPE HISTORY,PLACE, AND THE MAKING OF A DRYLAND RESERVOIR SYSTEM

Landscape history begins with the recognition that both past human experiences and archaeological research are fundamentally focused on specific locales. Locations are defined and made meaningful through processes of place-making, cultural processes that may be multiple and contested but which are never fully divorced from material conditions. Although both scholars and residents of particular places make constant temporal inferences (among others) about settlements, structures, and features, all historical arguments are in fact made on the basis of unified, contemporaneous material (or textual) landscaped in which diverse features jostle together out of time. It is argued here that traditional time-dissected analyses of long-term histories need to be combined with more unified studies of place in which landscape elements made at one time continue to be used, re-made, remembered, and perhaps forgotten.