We are seeking a research assistant to join the “Rivers of the Silk Roads: how water shaped societies and empires in Central Asia”, Leverhulme Trust funded project. Applicants should have expertise in remote sensing and hydraulic modelling. Applicants will be required from October 2022 to work with Professor Mark Macklin (University of Lincoln, UK) and Dr Willem Toonen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands). The importance of Central Asia’s Silk Roads to world history is well known. But what is not understood is the role that rivers in the region played in the development of nomadic and urban societies, and empires, particularly irrigation-based agriculture but also as water-rich corridors for pastoralists and travellers. Rivers of the Silk Roads is a novel and ambitious interdisciplinary project which uses state-of-the-art dating, hydraulic modelling and satellite imaging techniques, combined with archaeological investigations of ancient canal systems, to provide the first multi-millennial length reconstructions of changing water resources and water hazards along Central Asia’s Silk Roads. The research assistant will facilitate process-based connections between short- and long-term hydroclimatic change and the dynamics of regional flood-irrigation networks in each study area. Site based reconstructions will be made of flood regime changes in order to infer water availability for irrigation. Combined with a functional analysis of irrigation-canal networks, based on remote sensing and field investigations, agricultural yield will be modelled.
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[Website University of Lincoln]