Joe Pitts’s Reviews > Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West > Status Update

“It said what only an ethnologist might have been expected to know: that agriculture developed first in arid lands, that irrigation agriculture was historically the first agriculture worthy of the name, that on the Indus and the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile, as well as in the American Southwest, stable civilizations had built themselves on the necessity of controlling streams for irrigation.”