Focus Article Modern impacts on an ancient landscape, the piedmont plain in southwest Turkmenistan Jonas Berking, 1 * Brian Beckers, 1 Tony Reimann, 2 Susan Pollock 3 and Reinhard Bernbeck 3 The piedmont plain in southwestern Turkmenistan has experienced a millennia- long settlement history despite prevailing arid climates. One of the prerequisites for the various agricultural efforts was irrigation. Most of the water used for irri- gation measures came from the adjacent Kopet Dag mountain chain. This situa- tion changed with the introduction of the Karakum canal in the middle of the 20th century. The present study evaluates the rich irrigation history of the pied- mont plain by investigating two small catchments that drain the eastern ranges of the Kopet Dag. Within their catchments, geomorphological and hydrological analyses were conducted. We present several Optically Stimulated Lumines- cence and 14-C dating results that add to the understanding of the landscape his- tory from the Pleistocene until modern ages. Moreover, modern climatological and hydrological data were analyzed that show a remarkable drop in runoff from the Kopet Dag since the 1960s. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How to cite this article: WIREs Water 2017, e1202. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1202 INTRODUCTION T he piedmont plain in southwest Turkmenistan is an arid and nowadays remote area. How- ever, numerous settlement remains in the shape of small mounds (locally called depes) indicate that the area flourished in history and prehistory. For subsistence, these settlements relied on agriculture, raising of animals, and hunting, the first being only possible through irrigation measures. The area is among the earliest ones in Central Asia where agricultural activities, and hence irrigation, took place. 1–3 As in many arid environments, agricultural suc- cess was mainly controlled by the highly variable spatial and temporal availability of water. Despite these challenges, vast drylands have been culturally highly dynamic areas in which the inhabitants have developed multiple ways to cope with these uncer- tainties. 4,5 The art of managing drylands and mitigat- ing their risks is of significant interest to many studies and applications. 6–9 The special character of the area in focus is its very long and quasi-continuous settlement history coupled with its irrigation strategies. Moreover, it is a good example of the numerous central Asian riv- erine or oasis landscapes which have been nuclei of human settlement activities throughout history. 10 This changed during the last century when the Soviet regime built the Karakum Canal in the region, which detaches regional irrigation measures from the dependency on natural water availability and supply. *Correspondence to: jonas.berking@fu-berlin.de 1 Department of Earth Sciences, Physical Geography, Freie Univer- sität Berlin, Berlin, Germany 2 Netherlands Centre for Luminescence Dating, Soil Geography and Landscape group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands 3 Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of inter- est for this article. Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online ver- sion of this article. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 of 16