Half of the plots were well watered and green; the other half were parched and yellow.
Dr. Scarborough suggested that the most significant insight is that it allowed the Maya to successfully cope with their capricious tropical climate, one that causes floods half the year and parched dryness the other half.
This summer the country suffered its worst monsoon since 1972, which left half its rural districts parched, followed swiftly by floods that inundated two states.
Rain soaked the state last winter, stacking its mountains with colossal snowdrifts and quenching soil left parched after more than half a decade of historic drought.
Perhaps, half a century hence, as she surveys the parched Antipodean wilderness, Ms Gillard will be able to congratulate herself on her prescience.
But while southern China is relatively wet, the north, home to about half of China's population, is an immense, parched region that now threatens to become the world's biggest desert.
And his recurring concerns and preoccupations are repeatedly described in terms of exile and uprootedness ("we have been stupidly parched by history") as, in poem after poem, he brandishes this predicament half proudly, half resentfully: "I was not my father as you are not yours / But let's be clear – we are illuminated residue, threaded".
Half the people and two-thirds of the country's farmland are in the parched north mainly in the Yellow river basin.
On a still half-parched South Williamsburg block that also features Orthodox Jewish women working out at Soma and bedraggled, pretty types squinting at the menus at Fatty 'Cue, this store, just a few weeks old, is hidden on the second floor, with only a painted logo on the sidewalk to guide you.
On a parched hill in central Bolivia, a blue tanker winds its way past half-built houses carrying water to Alto Buena Vista, a hillside settlement in the south of the city of Cochabamba.
Half of them are in Ethiopia, primarily in the Ogaden region bordering Somalia, where three years of drought has parched the land and dried up wells.
