Tapping Environmental History to Recreate America's Colonial Hydrology

Throughout American history water has played a central role in biological and economic exchange. Water and the energy derived from it have largely determined patterns of human settlement. Humans, likewise, altered local and regional hydrosystems to meet their needs. Drawing from work generated at the Hydrologic Synthesis Institute held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during summer 2008, this study demonstrates that environmental history can generate new and important questions for hydrologists and that the science of hydrology can shed new light on early American history. The summer synthesis institute charted regional hydrologic change from Chesapeake Bay to the St. John River, between 1600 and 1800. Historical analyses that examine the period of first European settlement provide hydrologists with a more accurate understanding of baseline environments and how they responded to the principal drivers of hydrologic change, including human governance, water-engineering, land-cover modification, and climate change. Proxy data, such as colonial census records, import/export statistics, tax information, and weather observations, among others, can produce quantifiable assessments of hydrologic change in the distant past. Examining how regional hydrosystems functioned in the past and how humans changed them over time promises to shed new light on how present and future hydrosystems will respond to human-induced environmental change. The human-water linkage also has profound implications for history. Hydrologic modeling shows promise as a new form of historical evidence. Quantitative analyses of hydrosystems can take historical analyses beyond scattered 'perceptions' conveyed through more traditional anecdotal sources. Hydrologic evidence could provide new insights into patterns of population distribution and land management. Charting the metrics of hydrologic change, such as water availability, residency time, or the timing of peak and low flows, may shed new light on local-scale human social dynamics or even regional-scale political developments of both indigenous and settler societies. Ultimately, our study contends that historical analysis will deliver a new set of questions to the field of hydrology, which will broaden and enrich it. Environmental history, likewise, stands to gain a new empirical lens through which it can view the past, which will shed new light on the development of early American society.