Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind

Archaeologist and science writer Brian Fagan's new book, Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, is a comprehensive look at the history of water control. The book spans the world's history, and covers most of the continents in its scope, and it leaves the reader wondering how the water gets to her own tap. I really have no clue how that happens in my own house. Yet, the ability to control water, to make clean water available to farmland and in urban settings and at the same time control the safe flow of sewage is truly a piece of monumental architecture. So how did we learn to do that?

Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind. Cover image (c) Bloomsbury Press.

Long, Nearly Off-Topic Rant

A friend recently asked me if I knew of any evidence of aliens helping the peoples of the ancient past build their monuments, and after I said, as resoundingly as I could, "there is no evidence at all of such a thing", she said "oh, of course, they had slaves."

To my mind, that is a remarkable summation of what everyday (i.e., non-archaeologists, "normal" might be a better word) people think about the past, if they think of it at all: as "the other", as a great big generic glob of strangers in togas and jeweled crowns who whipped their people mercilessly and had nothing whatsoever to do with us. Thank you, Cecil B. De Mille. But, what my friend forgot, and I forget to say in such circumstances, is that "they" are "us". The people of the past are our ancestors in a very direct way, both genetically and intellectually. If it hadn't been for the great constructions of the past, we wouldn't have smart phones. Or water control systems.

If I was a true smarty pants, I would have said something like "yeah, the aliens did a great job on the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Empire State Building", because they are also monumental structures built without the aid of aliens or slaves. That, right there, is the core piece of Fagan's book: amazingly complex and intricate water control systems began with collaborative efforts to solve a common problem, and required neither slaves nor aliens.

Back to Elixir

What Fagan's book teaches us is that water control began with individuals, with farmers and communities who worked together to build irrigation canals and tap ground water for their needs. There are spectacular failures documented in the book, when climate change or social breakdowns occurred, and there are spectacular successes, when societies held it together for thousands of years.

There is no straight-line history to water control: it's complex, with starts and stops, with inventions and reinventions. Water-lifting devices, tunneling to access run off and ground water, gravity and pumping and water mills: all of these are part of collaborative human research. The intricately built science of how to get, use, conserve and recycle potable water is one based on thousands and thousands of years of research and experimentation.

And in fact, there are places on the earth today where our water control systems are breaking down (the American desert southwest for example), and most of us don't yet recognize how devastating the effects of that will be. Elixir helps that realization.

Bottom Line

This book is one of the best pop science books I've read in a long time. Unlike many of the books I read and review, I won't be turning Elixir over to a library or shoving it into a friend's hands too soon: because there is much to reread and contemplate before I let it out of my clutches.

Brian Fagan. 2011. Elixir: A History of Water and Human Kind. Bloomsbury Press: New York. ISBN 13:978-1-60819-003-4 (alkaline paper). 347 pages, end notes and index.

• Elixir: Compare Prices at PriceGrabber
• Review of Elixir, Hydro-Logic
• Elixir Book Extracts, at Fagan's website

Disclosure: A free copy of this book was provided by the author's publisher: further, Brian Fagan is a friend of mind (archaeology writers are few and far between). For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.