Summary: 

Interview conducted by: Dr. Paul Hirt, Arizona State University and Jennifer Sweeney, Four East Historical Research, LLC. Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program Administrative History Project. Administered by Arizona State University Supported by a grant from the US Bureau of Reclamation.

Biography: 

Robert S. "Bob" Lynch practices environmental law in Phoenix, Arizona. He has been involved with Glen Canyon Dam issues since the early 1980s. Born in Michigan and raised in Tucson, Lynch completed undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona and earned a Master of Laws from George Washington University. He was employed at the U.S. Department of Justice before moving to Phoenix, where he worked on Environmental Impact Statements for the Central Arizona Project. Lynch has consulted on many issues concerning hydropower and water rights, including some related to Glen Canyon Dam. He has served on the Federal Water Rights Task Force and numerous boards, associations and committees.

This research on the early metal ages of the Wadi el-Hasa focuses on settlement systems and attempts to explain how social, economic and political adjustments helped tribal groups survive under natural (i.e., climatic) and anthropogenic (i.e., land degradation, erosion) stress factors. The shifting of subsistence base from agropastoral to pastoral is reflected in site and population densities, diversity of site types, levels of internal complexity, and levels of social organization via the presence of large settlements, like villages, which acted as economic and administrative centers emerge as risk reduction mechanisms.

The cycles of abandonment and resettlement are evaluated within the concept of social reorganization and such changes are assessed as parts of economic revitalization attempts. The social changes that emerge from such shifts are evaluated from the perspective of the scale-free networks modeled and tested through statistical methods, such as ANOVA, for spatial and temporal patterns, while patterns of land use and the impacts of changing climate and anthropogenic activities are evaluated with GIS.

Following the dimorphic society and heterarchic social organization concepts, the discussion emphasizes that tribal groups adjust population density, range and intensity of activities in marginal landscapes, like the Hasa, in order to prevent environmental degradation. These patterns may change once these marginal landscapes are integrated to more complex social organizations. Although this takes place in the Hasa during the Iron Age, the research results imply that environmental degradation did not take place possibly due to the continuation of extensive subsistence patterns, along with the emergence of the long-distance caravan trade as a major economic incentive.