Ancient runoff harvesting agriculture in the arid Beer Sheva Valley, Israel: An interdisciplinary study (original) (raw)
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Geoarchaeololgy, 2018
In antiquity, the development of techniques to collect and store water was fundamental to sustain life in arid regions. One way to overcome the problem of water supply in the desert was to construct water reservoirs and cisterns which collect surface runoff during rare rain events. Indeed, open reservoirs and rock-cut cisterns are widely spread over the arid zone of the Negev Highlands. They were an important component of human activity in the area. Today, they can serve as sedimentary archives for archaeological and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. To shed more light on this valuable archive, the chronology of an ancient stone-lined, open reservoir was established by optically stimulated luminescence dating. By determining the age of the deposition of sediments associated with the reservoir, it was possible to constrain its construction (8th-11th centuries C.E.), duration of use (up to ca. 15th century C.E.), and final refilling (from the 15th century C.E. to the modern era). These results indicate that most human activity related to the reservoir occurred between the 8th-to-11th and the 15th centuries C.E., when permanent settlements are not recorded archaeologically in the region, suggesting that the studied water reservoir was primarily utilized by pastoral nomads.
Journal of Arid Environments, 2020
Ancient agricultural systems in the Negev Desert preserves abundant evidence of dryland farming from the Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic periods. These systems consist of dams, field plots, field towers, cisterns and thousands of human-made stone mounds. In the environment of Shivta, these systems also included built dovecotes to produce dung to fertilize vineyards and orchards. All of these elements established an intensive agronomic practice. Extensive survey and excavations in one completely preserved agricultural system in a small wadi in the hinterland of Shivta, followed by OSL dating of loess accumulations in the adjacent agricultural installations, in addition to dates from archaeological finds, revealed clear stratigraphic and chronological sequences. We found that the first human-made components were established in the Roman period (1st-2nd centuries CE) and the agricultural system flourished during the Byzantine period (5th-6th centuries CE) before it was abandoned in the post-Byzantine era. At its peak, all artificial components of the system would have had to operate together at an optimum level to make intensive agriculture possible. This agricultural system is a prime example of the enormous skill and knowledge of Shivta farmers in synergizing different agricultural installations to maintain agriculture in a desert environment.
Journal of Arid Environments , 2019
The Marmarica, an arid region in NW-Egypt between the Jebel el Akhdar to the west and the Nile Valley to the east, offers rich evidence for understanding the interlinkages of scarce natural resources, above all water and soil and their human utilization in antiquity. Analysing the natural hydrological regime depending on rainfall, soils and topography in the region and the man-made interventions lies at the heart of this landscape archaeological study. Integrating evidence from various disciplines (hydrology, geomorphology, soil science, archaeobiological methods, ceramic studies, evaluation of literary sources based on papyri) and from various periods (late 2nd millennium BCE to 7th century CE) allowed for the reconstruction of the ancient water management and the related life-strategies. An assessment of climatic conditions and morphological features of the Eastern Marmarica is provided, where wadis, alluvial fans, but also lateral wadi slopes and to a certain extent even parts of the vast tableland plains represent favourable geomorphological units for water harvesting and hence, agricultural production. Yet, a characteristic that sets the Marmarican systems apart from those in other arid regions are cultivated terrace systems (run-in areas) that are located on lower lateral valley slopes and even on the tableland plains. The results provide insights into the long-term responses of the inhabitants in antiquity to catchment hydrology by water harvesting and the effects of their interventions, the adapted livelihoods, regional specialization of rural production and intra- and interregional exchange of goods. However, new questions arose regarding i) the implications of the ancient water management strategy for the social organisation of the local people, ii) the destinations of locally produced pottery, iii) the habitational and land-use patterns before the Graeco-Roman period, iv) the role and range of climatic shifts, and v) reasons for the decline of the sophisticated runoff management.
In the Zerqa triangle in the Jordan Valley, irrigation would have been an important instrument to deal with the arid climate and its associated uncertainties concerning rainfall for societies in different periods. Before irrigation modernization efforts were started in the 1960s, the people of the Zerqa area used the known ethnohistorical irrigation system, which dates back to the Mamluk period. This system consisted of a number of sub-systems tapping water from the Zerqa river and transporting water to the fields through open canals under gravity. The settlement pattern of the Iron Age points to an irrigation system of similar type being in use during this period. The location of Early Bronze Age settlements along natural watercourses suggests that a form of flood irrigation was practiced, without a dedicated canal system. Each of these settings will have had its specific uncertainties in terms of water availability to deal with, which will be discussed. In other words, each setting provided specific materially structuring conditions for societies to develop responses in terms of agriculture, institutions and power relations. This contribution discusses these uncertainties and responses for the different periods. In the discussion, insights from both archaeology and irrigation engineering will be integrated.
Ancient agricultural systems based on runoff harvesting techniques are abundant in the Negev Highlands. The current study examined traditional classification and investigated the distribution of ancient agricultural systems around the Roman-Byzantine "Negev Towns" Avdat and Shivta, and across the terrain located between these sites and Makhtesh Ramon in the south. It led to an elaboration of the traditional classification of runoff agricultural systems in the Negev desert of southern Israel. We found that the key factors for building these types of agricultural systems were the geological and geomor-phological characteristics of the specific site locations and the geographic distance from nearby towns and roads. Depending on these factors, a multitude of types of agricultural systems were constructed in accordance with the physical characteristics of the local desert environment. This clearly indicates the continuation of the current desert climate throughout historical times. Furthermore, the large diversity of agriculture installations indicates that they were constructed by local farmers and not by an external plan imposed by the central government.
Journal of Arid Environments, 2019
The rise and fall of desert agriculture in the southern Levant has been debated among scholars for the last 200 years, in the chronological, the socio-political and the environmental context. Based on c. 31 OSL ages of sediments from agricultural terraces in various sites in the Negev Highlands, the main phase of ancient desert agriculture was dated to between the 3 rd-4th centuries CE and the 10 th-11th centuries CE (Avni et al., 2013). Within this longue durée process of agricultural activities, no significant environmental or climatic change was observed coinciding with the Byzantine-Islamic transition in the 7th century CE. Our research, which focused on the natural processes that influenced the rise and fall of the Negev desert agriculture, found that the agricultural installations were sustainable for at least 700 years and parts of these agricultural constructions are still in use today. This long period of usage is a clear indication of their robust design and their good adaptation to the desert environment, despite possible short-term climatic fluctuations. However, continuous flooding, gulling, soil erosion and siltation required constant maintenance of agricultural systems by the local farmers. In addition, the political and economic changes that followed the Byzantine-Islamic transition triggered a gradual decrease in the economic value of the products of desert agriculture, followed by a disruption of the social-political balance between local farmers and herders. These made the desert runoff agriculture less viable, leading to its final demise after the 10th century CE. Therefore, a direct link between the rise and fall of desert runoff agriculture and the claimed climatic changes in the southern Levant seems unlikely.