Yes, it’s been quiet on here over the summer: desperate (and fruitless) attempt to get a paper written in July when really needing a holiday, actual holiday, return to get paper finished so that I can get on with all the things I should be getting on with if I’d got the paper finished earlier, so that I can get on with the book that I really should be writing now. Normal service will doubtless be resumed as I start needing a few displacement activities from the book, but in the meantime – since it’s being precirculated anyway – herewith the draft of my paper on conflicts over water in the Roman empire, to be delivered at a fascinating session on comparative approaches to water resources at the Deutsche Historikertag in Mainz next week (on which I will report in due course). Yes, the paper ended up in a very different place from where it started (der Weg ist das Ziel, oder?), with a great deal of introductory flannel from when it suddenly occurred to me that I wouldn’t just be talking to ancient historians, and, yes, the title is indeed a tribute to the great New Year’s tradition of Dinner For One…
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/540143/The%20same%20procedure%20as%20last%20year.doc
Sphinx 
Very interesting subject. Thank you. Years ago in the 1970’s my late husband and I went exploring the barrows and standing stones on Salisbury plain.At Avebury we speculated about the purpose of Silbury Hill. It’s situated in an area where there are a lot of winterbournes – streams that only flow in winter.. When we arrived home he showed me in one of his learned journals (infuriatingly I cann’t remember which one) diagrams of how a mesopotamian quanaat was constructed, a form of water storage and conduction which, I understand, the Romans copied. The shape of a quanaat is so like the shape of Silbury Hill that it made us wonder if it might not be a water catchment area. If the prehistoric people who lived there knew how to conserve and deliver water in times of drought, they would have quite an advantage in their society.