An Archaeology of Tinkering: The Resilience of a Fragile Technology in Turpan, Xinjiang

This dissertation explores the mechanisms through which local communities in the desert oases of Turpan, Xinjiang, have sustained their subterranean irrigation technology (kariz) since at least the 11th–13th centuries. Using interdisciplinary, multi-scalar methods including archaeological excavation, luminescence dating, deep-learning–based remote sensing, and ethnography, I trace the longue-durée, intergenerational, and contemporary practices of maintenance. I argue that the kariz’s very fragility — its relative ease to collapse and break down — has precipitated a frequent, incremental, and non-uniform regime of maintenance that I term “tinkering,” facilitating rapid adaptation to environmental change. Repeated maintenance and labor investment have also organized intra-mural cooperation and local claims to ownership, water rights, and enduring craftsmanship across generations. Ethnographic comparison with recent cultural-heritage preservation of kariz shows that structural reinforcement and financial aid reassign the management of fragility to the external realms of insurance, bureaucratic paperwork, and state-appointed engineers. Such interventions tether the otherwise long lifespan of the kariz to institutional project cycles, displacing the needs and obligations to tinker and in some cases suspending operations altogether. This dissertation thus offers empirical evidence that technological resilience accrues from seemingly myopic, small-scale, improvisational repairs with regularity instead of long-term planning. In so doing, it also articulates a politics of climate justice where the very standards by which we declare fragility and marginalization can be challenged.

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