Adaptive Strategies in the Archaeology of the Negev

Baron, Aileen G.

doi:10.2307/1356546

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Such large-scale agriculture could only be sustained through extensive human transformation and maintenance of the landscape [20,26,41,43,44]. Farming was successful under harsh environmental conditions because of innovations in environmental niche engineering, specifically the development of landscape terracing, runoff water/sediment harvesting systems, and sustainable fertilizer production [19,20,24,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56].…”

Section: Environmental Conditions In the Negevmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A highly resilient runoff agriculture niche provided the economic backbone supporting Byzantine and Early Islamic (c. 4 th -10 th century CE) communities in the environmentally marginal Negev borderlands [11,19,20,23,[41][42][43][44][45][46]. The success of agriculture was conditioned by people's control over two key limiting factors in the region: water availability and soil quality.…”

Section: A Micro-geoarchaeological Approach To Trash Mound Deposits Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The success of agriculture was conditioned by people's control over two key limiting factors in the region: water availability and soil quality. Owing to the region's prevailing aridity, weak pedogenesis, and pervasive erosion, the productivity of this system relied on the transformation of desert sediments into arable lands through PLOS ONE the installation of water and sediment harvesting systems [19,20,24,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]; see 23, 24, 45 for an alternative view].…”

Section: A Micro-geoarchaeological Approach To Trash Mound Deposits Amentioning

confidence: 99%

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Byzantine—Early Islamic resource management detected through micro-geoarchaeological investigations of trash mounds (Negev, Israel)

et al. 2020

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Sustainable resource management is of central importance among agrarian societies in marginal drylands. In the Negev Desert, Israel, research on agropastoral resource management during Late Antiquity emphasizes intramural settlement contexts and landscape features. The importance of hinterland trash deposits as diachronic archives of resource use and disposal has been overlooked until recently. Without these data, assessments of community-scale responses to societal, economic, and environmental disruption and reconfiguration remain incomplete. In this study, micro-geoarchaeological investigations were conducted on trash mound features at the Byzantine-Early Islamic sites of Shivta, Elusa, and Nesanna to track spatiotemporal trends in the use and disposal of critical agropastoral resources. Refuse derived sediment deposits were characterized using stratigraphy, microremains (i.e., livestock dung spherulites, wood ash pseudomorphs, and plant phytoliths), and mineralogy by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Our investigations detected a turning point in the management of herbivore livestock dung, a vital resource in the Negev. We propose that the scarcity of raw dung proxies in the studied deposits relates to the use of this resource as fuel and agricultural fertilizer. Refuse deposits contained dung ash, indicating the widespread use of dung as a sustainable fuel. Sharply contrasting this, raw dung was dumped and incinerated outside the village of Nessana. We discuss how this local shift in dung management corresponds with a growing emphasis on sedentised herding spurred by newly pressed taxation and declining market-oriented agriculture. Our work is among the first to deal with the role of waste management and its significance to economic strategies and urban development during the late Roman Imperial Period and Late Antiquity. The findings contribute to highlighting top-down societal and economic pressures, rather than

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