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Fresh water is the blood of the land. Religions bathe their children and their saved with water. Greek philosophers described water as one of the four elements that made up the earth. Where is no water, there is no life. Humans can live a month without food, but die in a week without water. We live by the grace of water. Par¤t 1993 INTRODUCTION The importance of water as a factor in®uencing culture cannot be overstated . The development of water resources has always challenged human ingenuity as people have attempted to meet this basic need for survival. Nearly 4,000 years ago the king of Babylon boasted of making the desert bloom after bringing water to it. On the other side of the world, the Hohokam made a different desert bloom with the construction of intricate systems of irrigation canals between about 700 and 1450 a.d.. Long before the birth of Christ, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all had well-developed water-supply systems that allowed these great civilizations to rise to world prominence (Owen 1980). Indeed, a classic theory regarding the very birth of civilization centered on the control of this critical resource (Wittfogel 1957). Water is at once the great enabler and the great limiting factor of human settlement. The type of water source available to support life is strongly connected to human use of the landscape. Settlement patterns and densities are related to the accessibility of a stable and potable water resource to support domestic use. As technologies for providing more 11 Water-resource Controls on Human Habitation in the Black Prairie of North-Central Mississippi Darrel W. Schmitz, Charles L. Wax, and Evan Peacock stable and higher-quality water sources have emerged through time, populations and settlement distributions have grown and changed. All early settlements initially used primarily surface water; wells generally did not become commonplace until the late 1800s. With the exception of springs, the use of groundwater was unusual throughout most of the nineteenth century until pollution and disease in surface waters forced people to develop subsurface access (Kazmann 1972). The Black Prairie physiographic province of Mississippi (Figure 11.1) is developed on an outcrop of Cretaceous chalk. An investigation into the water resources of this province in Mississippi, where it is commonly referred to as the Black Prairie, shows that geology exerts a stronger control on the presence of sources of water for human use than in other areas of the state not underlain by chalk. Figure 11.2 shows the relationship between the controlling geology and surface-water features on the Black Prairie. Perennial streams do not normally exist unless their sources are outside the province, and almost all streams that do originate on the Black Prairie are ephemeral and depend on rainfall only to provide runoff. The chalk’s control over the course of the Tombigbee River on the eastern edge of the Black Prairie is also evident. The development of water resources in the Black Prairie appears to fall into several discrete time categories, each associated with identi-¤able technological innovations that affected the constraints or opportunities for settlement in the region. Each progressively higher level of technology allowed greater opportunity for a less limiting arrangement of house sites and settlement distribution. The purpose of this study is to document the different levels of water-resource technology that were used to support humans as they occupied the Black Prairie from prehistoric times to the present. CULTURAL BACKGROUND AND TECHNOLOGICAL STAGES From the earliest historical times, one of the most frequently cited characteristics of the Black Belt physiographic province has been the general lack of surface water (Bienville 1736, as quoted in Rowland and Sanders 1927:304; Adair 1930 [originally published in 1775]; Hawkins 1799, quoted in Rostlund 1957:401; Nutt 1805, in Jennings 1947; Darby 1818; Roberts 1818, in Rankin 1974; Long 1824, in Jennings 1947; Nance 1832; Gavin 1843; Lyell 1849, quoted in Rankin 1974). During the summer months evaporation is rapid and the smaller-order streams tend to dry up completely (Nutt 1805, in Jennings 1947:41; Burgess et al. 1960; Nance 1832; Rankin 1974; Rostlund 1957; Wailes 1854), a factor that in®uenced Historic settlement (Tower 1961) and undoubtedly prehistoric settlement as well. The lack of water available Water-resource Controls on Human Habitation 195 to the earliest Historic-period settlers in the Black Prairie region is indicated by a virtual lack of water-derived place names. Though absent in the Black Prairie itself, names...

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