Urban agricultural economy of the Early Islamic southern Levant: a case study of Ashkelon (original) (raw)
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This study provides one of the earliest examples of fruit tree cultivation worldwide, demonstrating that olive (Olea europaea) and fig (Ficus carica) horticulture was practiced as early as 7000 years ago in the Central Jordan Valley, Israel. It is based on the anatomical identification of a charcoal assemblage recovered from the Chalcolithic (7200-6700 cal. BP) site of Tel Tsaf. Given the site's location outside the wild olive's natural habitat, the substantial presence of charred olive wood remains at the site constitutes a strong case for horticulture. Furthermore, the occurrence of young charred fig branches (most probably from pruning) may indicate that figs were cultivated too. One such branch was 14 C dated, yielding an age of ca. 7000 cal. BP. We hypothesize that established horticulture contributed to more elaborate social contracts and institutions since olive oil, table olives, and dry figs were highly suitable for long-distance trade and taxation. The late 8th/early 7th millennium BP site of Tel Tsaf, located at the Central Jordan Valley (Israel; Fig. 1), is significant not only because of its large size but also because of the presence of storage silos on a scale not previously unearthed in the Proto-historic Near East 1,2. The material culture of the site is remarkably rich compared to contemporary sites in the region: dense concentrations of animal bones indicate large-scale feasts 3 ; a unique and elaborate style of pottery decoration was common, consisting of red and black geometric designs on white slip 4 ; a stone seal and some 140 seal impressions were found, including one vessel with two different seals 5,6 ; two large concentrations of ostrich eggshell beads were found: ca. 900 in a courtyard and 1668 beads in a single grave 4 ; some 100 stone beads were made of various green, red, and black minerals; additional imported substances and artifacts include raw greenstone chunks, Ubaid pottery from the northern Levant or Mesopotamia, obsidian from Anatolia, and Nilotic shells from Egypt 4 ; a copper awl, the earliest in the Levant, was deposited as a grave good 7. The site's splendid material culture and its participation in long-distance exchange were supported by the community's economic organization, embodied by its extraordinary storage capacity. Each building had 4-5 rounded silos, amounting to 20-30 tons storage capacity. They greatly exceeded the inhabitants' needs, indicating the operations of a complex economic system of surplus and wealth accumulation 1,2. The location of the silos within individual courtyard buildings suggests a degree of coordination and management of the agricultural system at the site. Additional evidence of this comes from the seed assemblage. The flotation samples from the silos contained cultivars and larger wild cereals but almost no small weed seeds or cereal processing debris, meaning that the cereals must have been fairly well cleaned, but not hand-picked before the grains were stored in the silo 8. The Tel Tsaf silos as well as some other earlier storage facilities from the region (e.g., the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A granaries from Dhra' in Jordan 9,10 , and the evidence from the northern Levant 11), also indicate that intensive human environmental intervention already existed during the Early Holocene, perhaps setting in motion processes that dramatically affected the region's vegetal landscape 12. Evidently, agricultural production was practiced at a scale capable of filling these storage facilities. Barley and wheat were the primary cultivars, but lentils and peas comprised important parts of the diet as well 8,13,14. Undoubtedly, an operation of such a large scale would have needed a sophisticated system of production, possibly including fertilizers, irrigation systems, and field management practices, such as incorporating fallow periods into the crop rotations 8. In turn, these features suggest a high degree of social stratification and commerce 1. As will be demonstrated in this study, this was the social and economic milieu that made the development of orchard economy at Tel Tsaf possible. In comparison with the extensive discussion of cereals 1,2,8 , and legumes 8,13 , very little is known about the arboreal vegetation at Tel Tsaf and its environs. The charred wood assemblage recovered by the first expedition during 1979, yielded only 21 specimens 15 composed of (in descending order): Quercus ithaburensis (Mount
Seeds of Civilization: Bronze Age Rural Economy and Ecology in the Southern Levant
Annals of The Association of American Geographers, 1998
This paper considers the economic and environmental impacts of emerging regional commerce that accompanied the rise and collapse of early Near Eastern urbanism. We integrate regional data on settlement and vegetation with detailed evidence of rural agriculture from two Bronze Age villages in the Jordan Valley. This approach is explicitly rural, in light of the largely rural character of Levantine civilization, and in response to more orthodox analytical perspectives focused on the first cities. Long-standing interest in the advent of agriculture now reveals that intensive localized depletion of woodland resources followed the aggregation of sedentary agrarian communities in the eighth through sixth millennia B.C., while the development of specialized pastoralism established one potential source of more extensive, subsequent defoliation. We argue, however, that regional human impacts on Levantine vegetation were triggered only with the genesis of Bronze Age cities and urbanized economies in the third and second millennia B.C. Thereafter, these regional impacts molded an ever-shifting mosaic of anthropogenic and natural landscapes. Rank-size analysis illustrates the modestly integrated, largely rural nature of Bronze Age settlement in the southern Levant. In this context, Tell Abu en-Ni'aj and Tell el-Hayyat provide appropriate examples of the resilient agrarian villages that persisted through the dramatic collapse and rebirth of early Levantine cities. Excavated plant remains and animal bones show that their inhabitants responded to the development of Bronze Age urbanism with a shift toward increased management of taxa with greater market potential, tempered by some retention of local economic autonomy. Shifts to greater sheep husbandry and, most significantly, cultivation of orchard crops like olives, figs, and grapes, signal a second wave of economic innovation that fundamentally altered the agricultural strategies of village farmers and their exploitation of the surrounding countryside. Thus the mixed cultural and natural landscapes that have supported long-term agriculture in the Levant reflect a legacy of discontinuous changes in rural economy and ecology in response to the waxing and waning of urbanized society and regional mercantile exchange.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2021
The ongoing discussion on the nature of the organization of Early Bronze Age settlements and their social structure in an intensely settled part of the southern Levant (independent 'city-states' vs 'neither cities nor states') calls for data on which to base our understanding of shared economic patterns and regional connections. Here, we report the results of our macrobotanical investigation of the Early Bronze Age III (2,680-2,600 cal BCE) levels at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfī/Gath, a large fortified settlement in central Canaan. A dense residential neighborhood was sampled at high resolution for a multi-faceted analysis of plant use in order to address its economic strategies and regional relationships. The resulting rich and diverse plant assemblage enables reconstruction of the diversity of agriculture, fuel sources, land use practices, mobility, and connectivity. Results of the study provide, for the first time, direct botanical evidence for the structural patterns of an intensive localized agro-pastoral economy and enable comparative analysis of the regional diet. Moreover, the results shed light on rare yet continuous longdistance plant dispersal and human mobility across biogeographical boundaries within the southern Levant.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2024
Early agricultural practices are often viewed as such a radical transformation that they not only structured and drove the long-term development of subsistence economies, but also required a dramatic reorganization of how community-wide economic relations were reckoned and enacted. This article examines how data derived from loci of economic production can inform us about the structure of economic relations in early agricultural communities, so as to better test such claims of political-economic disruption against the archaeological record. It does so by analyzing the site of al-Khayran in the west-central Jordan. Al-Khayran dates to the southern Levantine Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, the time period when predominantly agricultural economies first emerge in the region. Results show that a typical village-based residential group temporarily and repeatedly inhabited a substantially-built in-field structure while practicing intensive agricultural production. These results indicate that the site's inhabitants carried out a form of dual residence mobility with heavy investment on-site in perimetrics via landesque capital. Such behavior suggests that at least some residential groups in this time period were indeed corporate groups that agentively intervened in economic systems to actively assert and enact the private holding of the means of production during the emergence of agricultural economies.
Journal of Landscape Ecology, 2017
The Shephelah, known as the breadbasket of the southern Levant, is one of the more extensively investigated regions of the southern Levant in terms of archaeobotanical research. However, studies dealing with agriculture are scarce in comparison to the archaeobotanical data available. The analysis of the archaeobotanical assemblage in combination with the archaeological remains from Tel Burna will contribute to the investigation of the agriculture of the Shephelah. Several seasons of excavation revealed a cultic complex dating to the Late Bronze Age and an Iron Age II settlement with various agricultural installations such as silos and wine or olive presses. In this paper, we present the agricultural features in conjunction with the systematical archaeobotanical sampling, which enables us to reconstruct the types of crop plants cultivated at the site. Grass pea seeds dominate the assemblage collected from the Late Bronze Age complex, which may point to a connection to the Aegean. The Iron Age assemblage is distinguished by a significantly broad range of crop plants which were cultivated in vicinity of the tell. The archaeological Iron Age remains indicate that the processing of secondary products such as olive oil, wine, or textiles took place within the Iron Age settlement of Tel Burna. This first comprehensive overview describes the character of agricultural production in the Late Bronze Age to Iron Age environmental and geopolitical transformations.
Journal of Islamic Archaeology, 2018
Few archaeobotanical studies have been undertaken on Islamic period sites in Eastern Arabia. Excavations conducted by Dr. Axelle Rougeulle (UMR 8167) at Qalhât in the framework of the Qalhât Development Project, have provided the opportunity to improve our knowledge on plant consumption and supply strategies. Samples from the workshop B39 (14 th -16 th c. AD) excavated in 2014-2015 have provided a substantial amount of seed and fruit remains that are the object of this study. First, the distribution of plant remains within B39 provides us with hints to the use of the different spaces. Thus it is suggested that domestic activities such as food preparation and the cleaning of crops prior to their consumption took place mostly in room E. Then, most of the remains correspond to crops of tropical origin such as Asian rice (Oryza sativa), finger millet (Eleusine coracana ssp. coracana), mung bean (Vigna cf. radiata), mat bean (Vigna cf. aconitifolia), cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) and sesame (Sesamum indicum). Their presence at the site raises the question of their origin, either as imported goods or crops cultivated locally. In the case of an importation, the Indian subcontinent seems to be the most probable centre of origin although other regions, notably Yemen, may also be considered. Further, we discuss the possibility for the introduction of tropical crops into local agrosystems present near the site.
A.M. Hansen, B.J. Walker, F.B.J. Heinrich. Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie 56 (2017): pp. 58-69. In this paper we present the results of the archaeobotanical analysis of impressions of plant remains encountered in the profile and on the surface of clay fragments of ṭāwabīn. The fragments originate from Mamluk contexts at the site of Tall Hisban located in southern Bilad as-Sham (modern Jordan and Palestine). This study models the formation process of the botanical component of the ṭābūn as a context and explores the underlying processes explaining the presence of the different kinds of impressions. After providing a description of the ṭābūn and consulting historical and ethnographic descriptions, we present our model and interpret the results of the archaeobotanical analysis through it. Furthermore, the archaeobotanical data obtained from the analysis of ṭābūn fragments helps contribute to the knowledge of the Tall Hisban food economy. The importance of barley at the site during this period is not only reflected through ṭābūn fragments, but more importantly are proxies for economic activities in the village.
The Iron Age I in the Levant: The View from the North (Part I), 2019
Current archaeobotanical research plays an integral role in comprehending agricultural economies of ancient Near Eastern societies. Despite the long history of archaeological research in this region, available archaeobotanical data from Late Bronze and Early Iron Age sites in the Northern Levant are relatively scarce. This article reviews the available archaeobotanical data to identify any contrasting patterns that might allow us to determine changes in the nature of agricultural production during the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. We also evaluate the stable carbon isotopic evidence from Near Eastern sites to explore any recognizable trends toward increasing aridity in the region. By integrating new archaeobotanical and stable carbon isotope results from Tell Tayinat, we want to contribute to a more complete picture of the regional patterns of crop husbandry in the Levant. Crop data demonstrates a renewed interest in water-demanding crops during the earlier Iron Age. In conjunction, stable isotope data for Tayinat and many other sites show only minimal stress conditions related to water availability.
A 2500-year historical ecology of agricultural production under empire in Dhiban, Jordan
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2018
Archaeological plant remains have played a limited role in understanding how pre-modern imperial interventions affected the lives of communities incorporated into their political networks. The analysis of paleoethno-botanical data collected from a multi-year excavation project in Dhiban, Jordan, illustrates how the high-resolution and systematic sampling of archaeological plant remains within a historical ecological framework can provide new insights into long-term changes in agricultural practice in the context of shifts in non-local imperial interventions. The analysis of over 200 archaeological sediment samples representing nearly 2500 years of in-habitation reveal shifts in the relative abundances of particular crops correlating to separate moments of imperial intervention, in particular during the Byzantine (ca. 330-635 CE) and Mamluk (ca. 1250-1450 CE) empires .
Journal of Field Archaeology, 2023
Archaeological plant remains are key data in the identification of the material consequences of imperial interventions in past local lifeways. In this paper, the spatial and stratigraphic analysis of plant remains preserved in a hypothesized kitchen context from the archaeological site of Dhiban, Jordan, is presented in detail. This context is dated to ca. A.D. 570-640 based on 16 AMS dates, a time when the Dhiban community was part of and located at the eastern edge of the Byzantine empire. Analysis of over 130 point-provenienced flotation samples reveals a local emphasis on the agricultural production of wheat, peas, and grape, in spite of the challenges of water management in a semi-arid landscape. Comparison with other nearby and contemporaneous sites indicates that while all grew a similar suite of crops, their frequencies vary, possibly indicating a community of agricultural practice specializing in different foodstuffs or crops.