Chronicle Online e-News
Cornell students investigate how ancient Indian gardens thrived in
arid conditions
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb07/old.gardens
.India.sl.html
Feb. 14, 2007
By Susan Lang
ssl4@cornell.edu
Some 400 years ago, magnificent gardens flourished at Ahhichatragarh,
the Fort of Nagaur, in Rajasthan, India, in the middle of the Thur
Desert. Today, the fort is a UNESCO Heritage site, its complex of
richly painted palaces recently restored to be a major tourist
attraction and economic generator for the region -- but the
elaborate, thriving gardens are history.
Kathryn Gleason, a Cornell historical garden archaeologist, recently
led a team of her graduate students on a 10-day excavation of the
now-vanished gardens to probe into how the extensive Mughal- and
Rajput-era gardens that graced the fort's palaces in the 16th and
17th centuries thrived in such arid conditions. Their goal was also
to glean valuable clues for developing sustainable gardens in desert
areas worldwide.
The group's findings are now being applied to the recreation of the
gardens and their water system as part of the overall restoration of
the complex.
"It immediately became clear how the water provision and drainage
supported the gardens, but, less expectedly, the excavations also
gave the first evidence that the garden soils themselves were key to
the water distribution and drainage within the larger water
harvesting system," says Gleason, a Cornell associate professor of
landscape architecture with an Oxford University doctorate in
archaeology. "The enriched loams of the garden soils are underlain by
deep layers of sand, which appear to have allowed for successful
irrigation and redirection of the water, possibly to known drains
leading out to ponds on the periphery."
Accompanying Gleason were landscape architecture master's degree
students Jacob Brown and Stacy Day; Carolyn Keenan, a historic
preservation student; and archaeology and anthropology doctoral
students Daniel Costura, MLA '01, and Maureen Costura.
Their participation was funded by the Louis Berger Group, consulting
engineers, under the direction of Senior Vice President James
McClung, Eng. '78. The team visited the firm's facilities in Delhi
and Agra, including its Environmental Center, which is working to
create sustainable energy resources in Agra in an effort to mitigate
sources of pollution that are eroding the Taj Mahal.
The Louis Berger Group offers summer internships to Cornell students
for projects around the world in engineering, planning, landscape
architecture, architecture, archaeology, cultural resource management
and project management. McClung and other staff of the Louis Berger
Group will visit Cornell April 9-12 to present the latest internship
opportunities.
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