Daniel Fuks | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Books by Daniel Fuks

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament, Chapter 4, 2018

The diversity of plants and animals in the Land of Israel resonates deeply with the Bible's imag... more The diversity of plants and animals in the Land of Israel resonates deeply with the Bible's imagery, commandments and depictions of daily life. In this short chapter we will attempt to provide a basic background to the flora and fauna of ancient Israel from an archaeological perspective. Our aim is to set the stage for discussion of human cultural and economic relationships with plants and animals in this region (addressed in future chapters) by focusing on the rise of ancient agro-pastoral systems and the changing natural landscape. We will begin with a snapshot of the natural landscape as it appears today, focusing on a few of the major vegetation and faunal types in Israel, before attempting a brief history of human-landscape interaction.

Articles by Daniel Fuks

Animal Frontiers, 2021

Biologists since Darwin considered domestication a model for the study of evolution; we argue tha... more Biologists since Darwin considered domestication a model for the study of evolution; we argue that domestication may also be a model for the study of globalization.

The long-term history of wheat and sheep domestication exemplifies the intensification of relationships between humans and a small number of species native to southwest Asia, which includes long-term globalizing processes.

Specific indicators are offered for tracking the long-term globalization of sheep and wheat, with reference to production intensity, geographic diffusion, and diversity.

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 2020

A key question in archaeobotany concerns the role of herbivore dung in contributing plant remains... more A key question in archaeobotany concerns the role of herbivore dung in contributing plant remains to archaeobotanical assemblages. This issue has been discussed for at least 40 years and has motivated several archaeobotanical studies on identifying dung-derived deposition of plant remains. Meanwhile, microarchaeological methods have developed and continue to be developed for detecting dung in archaeological sediments, and multi-proxy methodologies are being used to study the botanical components of dung-associated sediments. Combining these approaches, the authors recently led a study incorporating different botanical proxies (seeds, pollen, phytoliths) with geoarchaeological sedimentary analysis to compare dung pellets and associated sediments. This approach presents a new way to gauge the contribution of dung-derived plant remains in archaeobotanical assemblages, which is further explored in this follow-up paper. The present paper further highlights how multi-proxy archaeobotanical investigation of individual dung pellets can provide information on seasonality, grazing range and herding practices. Their short production and deposition time make herbivore dung pellets time capsules of agropasto-ral activity, a useful spatio-temporal unit of analysis, and even a type of archaeological context in their own right. Adding different biomolecular and chemical methods to future multi-proxy archaeobotanical investigation of herbivore dung will produce invaluable high-resolution reconstructions of dung microbiomes. Ultimately, unpacking the contents of ancient dung pellets will inform on the species, physical characteristics, diet, niche, and disease agents of the ancient pellets' producers. Expanded datasets of such dung-derived information will contribute significantly to the study of ecosystem transformation as well as the long-term development of agriculture and pastoralism.

PNAS, 2020

The international scope of the Mediterranean wine trade in Late Antiquity raises important questi... more The international scope of the Mediterranean wine trade in Late Antiquity raises important questions concerning sustainability in an ancient international economy and offers a valuable historical precedent to modern globalization. Such questions involve the role of intercontinental commerce in maintaining sustainable production within important supply regions and the vulnerability of peripheral regions believed to have been especially sensitive to environmental and political disturbances. We provide archaeobo-tanical evidence from trash mounds at three sites in the central Negev Desert, Israel, unraveling the rise and fall of viticulture over the second to eighth centuries of the common era (CE). Using quantitative ceramic data obtained in the same archaeological contexts, we further investigate connections between Negev viticulture and circum-Mediterranean trade. Our findings demonstrate interrelated growth in viticulture and involvement in Med-iterranean trade reaching what appears to be a commercial scale in the fourth to mid-sixth centuries. Following a mid-sixth century peak, decline of this system is evident in the mid-to late sixth century, nearly a century before the Islamic conquest. These findings closely correspond with other archaeological evidence for social , economic, and urban growth in the fourth century and decline centered on the mid-sixth century. Contracting markets were a likely proximate cause for the decline; possible triggers include climate change, plague, and wider sociopolitical developments. In long-term historical perspective, the unprecedented commercial florescence of the Late Antique Negev appears to have been un-sustainable, reverting to an age-old pattern of smaller-scale settlement and survival-subsistence strategies within a time frame of about two centuries. Negev | Byzantine Empire | archaeobotany | protoglobalization | economic archaeology

http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/fuks353

The climate factor has become a focus of much historical and archaeological investigation, encour... more The climate factor has become a focus of much historical and archaeological investigation, encouraged recently by improvements in palaeoclimatic techniques and interest in global climate change. This article examines correlations between climate and history in the Byzantine southern Levant (c. 4th–7th centuries AD). A proposed 5th century economic downturn attested to by numismatic trends is shown to coincide with palaeoclimatic evidence for drought. We suggest a climatic ultimate cause for the apparent economic decline. In addition, the relationship between the Dust Veil Index (DVI) and annual precipitation in Jerusalem suggests the likelihood of increased precipitation following the 536 AD volcanic dust veil. This prediction is borne out by high-resolution precipitation reconstructions from Soreq cave speleothems and by sedimentation records of extreme flash flooding. These finds complement palaeoclimatic reconstructions from Europe showing a drop in precipitation after 536 AD. Drought in Europe and flooding in the Middle East are both expected outcomes of global cooling during volcanic winters, such as those described in historical accounts of the 530s AD.

Antiquity 93/367, 2019

Recent excavations in the historic centre of ancient Jerusalem have revealed evidence of an Abbas... more Recent excavations in the historic centre of ancient Jerusalem have revealed evidence of an Abbasid (eighth-to tenth-century AD) marketplace. Refuse pits and cesspits have yielded an exceptionally well-preserved archaeobotanical assemblage-the first to be recovered from a Levantine marketplace, and the first in the region to be almost entirely preserved by mineralisation. Among several rare species identified is the earliest discovery of aubergine in the Levant. The assemblage includes staple and luxury food plants, medicinal herbs and plants used for industrial production, illuminating patterns of consumption , production, trade and the socioeconomic structure of Abbasid Jerusalem.

The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens o... more The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Le-vant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire. ancient urban trash mounds | societal collapse | Late Antique Little Ice Age | Byzantine period | southern Levant

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2020

The topic of agricultural innovation in the Early Islamic empires has become increasingly relevan... more The topic of agricultural innovation in the Early Islamic empires has become increasingly relevant for archeology, history, and even agricultural science. The validity of AndrewWatson’s original “Islamic Green Revolution” thesis will ultimately be verified or vindicated through archaeobotanical research, as Watson himself has suggested. However, rigorous criteria for exploiting the available archaeobotanical data and testing the basis of this thesis are needed. A simple theoretical framework relating archaeobotanical data to agricultural revolution is advanced below, and methodological criteria are presented for interpreting plant species introductions from the archeological record. These are applied to archaeobotanical “first finds” from an unprecedented assemblage of mineralized plant remains from an Abbasid Jerusalem bazaar, which included the earliest evidence for eggplant (Solanum melongena) in the Levant. Finally, we advocate a regional, crop-by-crop strategy for further interdisciplinary research on the Islamic Green Revolution.

Quaternary Science Reviews, 2019

This article presents a systematic methodological comparison of three archaeobotanical proxies (p... more This article presents a systematic methodological comparison of three archaeobotanical proxies (phytoliths, pollen and seeds) applied to an assemblage of dung pellets and corresponding archaeological refuse deposits from Early Islamic contexts at the site of Shivta. We set out with three main methodological questions: one, to evaluate the relative input of botanical remains from dung in refuse assemblages ; two, to evaluate each archaeobotanical dataset and to test whether they are comparable, complementary or contradictory in their interpretations from dung; and three, infer herding practices at the site during the Early Islamic period. Our findings show that ovicaprine dung accumulated in Early Islamic Shivta during at least two periods: mid-7themid-8th centuries CE, and late-8th - mid-10th centuries CE. Methodologically, we see incomplete and incompatible reconstructions arise when each method is considered alone, with each proxy possessing its own advantages and limitations. Specifically, the amount of preserved seeds in dung pellets is low, which restricts statistical analysis and tends to emphasize small or hard-coated seeds and vegetation fruiting season; yet this method has the highest taxonomic power; pollen preserves only in uncharred pellets, emphasizes the flowering season and has an intermediate taxonomic value; phytoliths have the lowest taxonomic value yet complete the picture of livestock feeding habits by identifying leaf and stem remains, some from domestic cereals, which went unnoticed in both seed and pollen analyses. The combined archaeobotanical reconstruction from samples of the mid-7th -mid-8th centuries suggests that springtime herding at Shivta was based on free-grazing of wild vegetation, supplemented by chaff and/or hay from domestic cereals. For the late-8th - mid-10th century samples, phytolith and pollen reconstruction indicates autumn-winter free-grazing with no evidence of foddering. Unlike the dung pellets, macrobotanical remains in the refuse deposits included domestic as well as wild taxa, the former mainly food plants that serve for human consumption. Plant remains in these refuse deposits originate primarily from domestic trash and are only partially composed of dung remains. The significance of this study is not only in its general methodological contribution to archaeobotany, but also to lasting discussions regarding the contribution of dung remains to archaeological deposits used for seed, pollen and phytolith analyses. We offer here a strong method for determining whether deposits derive from dung alone, are mixed, or absolutely do not contain dung. This has important ramifications for archaeological interpretation.

Papers by Daniel Fuks

Quaternary Science Reviews