On the Fringe of Society
Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives
on Pastoral and Agricultural Societies
Jerusalem, 3 June 2004
|
On the Fringe of Society Jerusalem, 3 June 2004 |
First session:
The archaeology of pastoralism and agriculture
(to see abstract, click on the title)
8:30 - 9:00
Liora Kolska Horwitz (Hebrew University) and Uzi Avner (Independent Scholar): Traditional Bedouin pastoralism as an analogue for Early Bronze Age pastoralism in the Levant
9:00 - 9:30
Jacob Vardi, Sorin Hermon and Steven A. Rosen (all of Ben Gurion University): The Early Bronze IV (2200-2000 BCE) economy in the Negev Highlands: The lithic evidence
9:30 - 10:00
Moti Haiman (Israel Antiquities Authority): Pastoralism, Agriculture and the desert ecosystem in the Negev in the Iron Age II
10:00 - 10:15 coffee break
10:15 - 10:45
Hendrik Bruins (Ben-Gurion University): Nomads settling down or farmers conquering the desert: Iron Age terraces at Horvat Haluqim
10.45 - 11.15
Tali Erickson-Gini (Israel Antiquities Authority): The transformation of Nabataean society: acculturation or self-organization?
11:15 - 11:45
Østein LaBianca (Andrews University): Geographical and cultural factors impacting local food systems and the transcient nature of Secondary States in the Southern Levant
11:45 - 12:30 brunch break
Second session
Pastoralism and agriculture in the Ottoman period
12:30 - 13:00
Bethany Walker (Oklahoma State University, Dept. of History): Regional markets and their impact on agriculture in Mamluk and Ottoman Transjordan
13:00 - 13:30
Eveline van der Steen (Albright Institute) : The political and economic organization of the Kerak Plateau: town and countryside
13:30 - 14:00
Dan Gazit (Ben Gurion University): The revival of sedentism in Israel’s Northern Negev from 1882 to 1917. From wilderness to oasis
14:00 - 14:15 coffee break
14:15 - 14:45
Benjamin Saidel (Albright Institute) and Abed Barakat (Independent Scholar): Pillars of fertility: Spanish coins as fertility amulets among the Bedouin and Fellahin
14:45 - 15:15
Yuval Yekutieli (Ben Gurion University): The house of Al-Turi
15:45 - 16.15 tea and sandwiches
Third Session:
The ethnoarchaeology of pastoralism and agriculture
16:15 - 16:45
Emmanuel Marx (Tel Aviv University): Pastoralists and settled people
16:45 - 17:15
Uzi Avner (Independent Scholar): Bedouin Cultural Remains in the Eilat Region
17:15 - 17:45
Erin Addison (School of Landscape Architecture, University of Arizona): Doing With and Doing Without: water use patterns amongst the Bani Sakhr of Jordan
17:45 - 18:15
Tim Laniak (Albright Institute): Sliding toward home: The magnetism of sedentarization
18:15- 20:00: wine and cheese
ABSTRACTS
Liora Kolska Horwitz and Uzi Avner: Traditional Bedouin pastoralism as an analogue for Early Bronze Age pastoralism in the Levant.
Traditional Bedouin pastoralism has frequently been invoked as the model for past modes of subsistence in desert regions. Past communities in the desert are perceived as semi-nomadic pastoralists, practicing short-term seasonal transhumance as they searched for pasture and water. This is assumed to have occurred within a circumscribed territorial radius, was supplemented by seasonal cultivation of cereal crops as well as limited horticulture and involved some degree of dependency on sedentary communities.
In this paper, we will discuss the relevance of this ethnographic model to the Levantine Early Bronze Age record (3 rd millennium BC) using archaeological and archaeozoological information derived from sites in the Negev Desert, Sinai Peninsula, Southern and Eastern Jordan.
The issues to be discussed will include: population density, site size and function, evidence for agriculture, herd size and composition, the carrying capacity of the different arid zones and evidence for trade. These data will be used to evaluate the antiquity of traditional Bedouin life-style and the applicability of ethnographic analogies for elucidating past economic strategies.
Jacob Vardi, Sorin Hermon and Steven A. Rosen: The Early Bronze IV (2200-2000 BCE) economy in the Negev Highlands: The lithic evidence
The analysis of the lithic assemblages from two EB IV sites, Ein Ziq and Be’er Resisim shows that the bulk of lithic production was directed to the manufacture of tools for domestic use, and for cottage industry production. Comparison to two earlier assemblages from EB I-II sites, the Camel site and Nahal Tzafit, demonstrates basic economic and technological continuities between the periods. It appears that in both, evidence for intensive agriculture is scarce.
The assemblages from Ein Ziq and Be’er Resisim are each composed of more than 20,000 artifacts with approximately 15% tools. These are dominated by ad hoc flake tools. The presence of large quantities of flake waste and amorphous flake cores clearly indicate expedient on-site production. The range of tool types includes retouched flakes, notches, denticulates, crude scrapers, and borers, none showing any degree of morphological standardization, nor any evidence for production specialization. The only evidence for any type of specialization occurs in the concentration of some 40 microlithic drills, along with shells, reflecting a cottage industry for bead production and exchange. The scarcity of sickle segments suggests that agriculture was only a minor component in the activities at these sites, contrasting significantly the lithic assemblages from village sites in the Mediterranean zone.
Comparison with the Early Bronze Age assemblages shows basic technological continuities with several significant typological changes. The virtual absence of tabular scrapers from the EB IV assemblages suggests both a change in the exchange structure of the societies, since these were the products of exchange, and perhaps a change in aspects of ritual, since these tools have been associated with cult. The absence of arrowheads, particularly microlithic lunates and other transverse points, suggests either a decline in the significance of hunting (or warfare) or a technological change where stone-tipped arrows were replaced by some other material, not preserved in the archaeological record.
The lithic industry of the EB IV sites in the Negev highlands should be understood as reflecting the domestic component of multi-resource nomadism.
Moti Haiman: Pastoralism, agriculture and the desert ecosystem in the Negev in the Iron Age II
Archaeological research has shown the existence of 350 Iron Age II sites in the Negev Highlands, including 60 fortresses and hundreds of dwelling structures.
The Iron Age II sites reflect a special phenomenon of limited distribution in the heart of a region, up to 15 km from a natural water source, totally depended on water cisterns and a limited distribution of the dwelling sites in a territory marked by fortresses.
About 400 animal pens were found in the sites indicating 20-30 animals per family, close to the size of the average herd of present-day Bedouin in the area, which is not enough to support a family.
Evidence of agricultural activity was found side by side with the animal pens: sickle blades, silos and threshing floors. However, taking into consideration the 80 mm annual rainfall, it is clear that the inhabitants could not subsist on the basis of agriculture.
There is a contradiction between the location of the settlements and the location of natural water sources, as well as between the economy of farmers and herders, and the fact that the distribution is limited only to the area between the fortresses.
In my view, this settlement reflected the needs of the United Monarchy of Israel in the 10th century B.C. to settle the southern frontier bordered by Egypt and Edom. This provisional settlement could only have existed as long as the specific geopolitical circumstances existed.
The desert ecosystem found in the Iron Age II is a universal ecosystem found in those harsh areas in all the periods, up to today. This ecosystem includes agriculture and animal husbandry as secondary occupations, while the main income is gained by a link with permanent settlements or the state.
Hendrik Bruins: Nomads settling down or farmers conquering the desert: Iron Age terraces at Horvat Haluqim
A buried, darker coloured, soil A-horizon exists across the entire width of terraced field 12 in the eastern wadi of Horvat Haluqim in the central Negev highlands. The first 14C dating results of organic material from the buried A-horizon, in combination with ceramic sherds, prove that the rainwater harvesting system was first established in the Iron Age (Bruins and Van der Plicht, in press). The building of the stone terrace wall (check-dam) improved the soil moisture conditions of the field, enabling crop production in the desert through ingenious runoff collection.
Finkelstein (1986) suggested that the Iron Age settlements in the Negev highlands were established by local nomads settling down. He attempted to make an analogy with Bedouin sedentarization in the Negev during the 20th century. However, a rare picture of Bedouin tents in a certain spatial alignment does not prove any similarity with the spatial outline and architecture of the Iron Age fortresses. Bedouin tents are usually not positioned close to each other, while having a preferred north-south orientation. Bedouin of the Azazmeh tribe in the Negev Highlands, who recently settled down from pastoral nomadism to a sedentary way of life, keeping goats and sheep while also engaging in marginal farming, do not apply manure in their use of ancient terraced fields in the region (Bruins, 1986; Bruins et al., 2003).
Micromorphology investigations of the thick buried A-horizon make it clear that the Iron-Age people who established Horvat Haluqim did use organic manure. It seems reasonable to assume that they had an established tradition and experience in farming: (a) the building and use of terraced fields for water and soil conservation, (b) the application of organic manure. Incidentally, the agricultural Hebron region is only 75 km away. Sheep/goat bones found in the buried A-horizon may indicate mixed farming: both pastoralism and runoff agriculture. The latter activity can only be practised on less than 5% of the land surface in the Negev Highlands with the aid of stone terrace walls (check-dams). The other 95% of the landscape could be used only for extensive grazing in terms of food production.
Tali Gini: The transformation of Nabataean society: acculturation or self-organization?
According to historical sources and what is currently known from the archaeological record, the Nabataeans appear to have originally been a nomadic society engaged in trade on a seasonal basis. The transformation of that society in the first century BCE was dramatic and enigmatic by normal standards. What factors accounted for the transition of the Nabataeans to sedentarization in this period? At present, most researchers credit acculturation for their rapid cultural, economic and sociopolitical development. While the Nabataeans were undoubtedly influenced to some degree by their contacts with neighboring societies in the Near East, their transformation in the first century BCE appears to be the result of the process of self-organization in which they responded to changing economic and political realities by developing a new subsistence strategy for survival.
Sten LaBianca: Geographical and cultural factors impacting local food systems and the transcient nature of Secondary States in the Southern Levant
This paper will argue that in order to understand the nature of local food systems and the transient nature of secondary states in the Southern Levant a number of specific geographical and cultural factors must be reckoned with:
First is the region’s geographic position astride an intercontinental land bridge linking together the continents of Africa, Europe and Asia. Having served since prehistoric times as a vital corridor of communication, migration, and trade, the Southern Levant has long been a coveted piece of real estate over which rival dynasties in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Greece, Rome and Western Europe have sought to exert control and domination.
Second is the proximity of the region to the Arabian steppe. For multiple millennia, this steppe has served not only as the desert headquarters of long-distance caravan trade, but also as a wellspring of Bedouin culture and aspirations. Since earliest antiquity Bedouin tribes from the Arabian steppe have infiltrated the fertile Southern Levantine heartland, replenishing its population while emboldening it in its resistance to foreign domination and control.
Third is the region’s natural endowment of which availability of water is the single most important factor impacting human livelihoods. As a general rule, rainfall is most plentiful in highland regions, especially as one moves northward and westward across the Southern Levant. Sedentary agriculture is thus most sustainable in the well-watered highlands of both sides of the Rift Valley and along the slopes of river valleys and wadies that drain eastward and westward from these parallel highlands. In these drainages natural springs and man-made cisterns, dams and terraces make water available year-around in this otherwise semi-arid landscape.
The combined impact of these three geographical factors go a long way toward explaining regional and temporal variations in local food systems throughout the Southern Levant. They also help explain the persistence of certain deep-rooted cultural adaptations that have been essential for human survival in this turbulent corridor of the ancient world. These “indigenous hardiness structures” include tribalism, clientism, agro-pastoralism, overlapping homelands, residential flexibility, low-care water sourcing, hospitality, and honor.
This paper will draw on archaeological and ethnoarchaeological data from Hesban and the Madaba Plains region to illustrate how the interaction of these geographic factors with local cultural factors help explain temporal and regional variation in the nature of agricultural and pastoral pursuits in various localities of the Southern Levant. The combined impact of these region-wide and cultural factors on the rise and persistence of secondary states within the Southern Levant will also be discussed.
Bethany Walker: regional markets and their impact on agriculture in Mamluk and Ottoman Transjordan
The decline of village life in Jordan after the fifteenth century and a parallel resurgence of pastoralism, which are lamented in historical sources and suggested by regional surveys, have traditionally been attributed to political collapse and environmental change. While natural phenomena, such as temperature change and drought, are certainly important factors, financial documents of the period suggest that market pressures and peculiarities of the provincial administration had more of a long-term impact on village life and agriculture in general. Three modern villages in central and northern Jordan have been selected for multidisciplinary investigations of these factors within the rubrics of a political ecological model. This area of inquiry combines research methods culled from the disciplines of history, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and geology and makes use of technologies originally developed in microbiology and electrical engineering to reconstruct the totality of human behavior that has transformed the environment.
This will be accomplished, in part, by identifying and quantifying the most archaeologically visible components of such cycles of exploitation and neglect: settlement and cropping patterns. The modern villages of Hisban in the Madaba Plains of central Jordan and Malka and Hubras in the Sawad of the north have been selected for this study because they are richly documented in contemporary written sources and have significant archaeological remains.
The identification and excavation of architecture and installations related to food processing and storage and village life as a whole, combined with water surveys, oral interviews with local landowners, and the extraction of medieval and modern soil samples, document the historical cycles of agricultural prosperity and decline and illustrate ways in which the villages have physically changed and their environments have been transformed since the 14 th century in response to the market demands of lucrative export commodities, namely processed cane sugar and olive oil.
Evelyn van der Steen: The political and economic organization of the Kerak Plateau: town and countryside.
This paper looks into the social and economic organization of the town of Kerak, Jordan, in the Ottoman period. The population of the town of Kerak consisted of a number of families, small tribes, and sections of larger tribes that roamed the Plateau. Thanks to the political skills of the leading family, the Majali, the town had political control over the Plateau, including the tribes that lived in the region. The main economic pursuits of the townspeople were agriculture and pastoralism, and most tribes and families were involved in both. They would camp on the plateau either in order to tend their flocks, and to cultivate their field. There was no clear division of economic pursuits within or between families, nor was there a clear separation between the town and the countryside. There was ongoing interaction between the tribes that lived on the Plateau, and the tribes that belonged to (but not always lived in) the town, and it can be stated that the town and the Plateau formed one political and economic unit.
This situation can function as a model for earlier periods, in which a number of small independent polities, centered on a single town formed the basic unit of economic and political power in the larger region.
Dan Gazit : The revival of sedentism in Israel’s Northern Negev from 1882 to 1917. From wilderness to oasis
The environment and rainfall patterns in the northern Negev indicate that the region is a desert. For the first 300 years of the Ottoman period, its inhabitants survived by crossing this area in search of grazing-grounds and patches of land which were suitable for seasonal agriculture. Based on archaeological research in lower Besor basin and its neighbouring plateau, there is evidence for sedentary populations emerging in this region at the treshold of the twentieth century. This paper uses this information to address the four following points. First, what were the conditions that led or encourage nomads to settle down in well-planned villages within one or two decades? Second, who planned this sedentary revolution and why? Third, how was this policy implemented and, fourth, what were the changes in the social and economic organization of the inhabitants?(Dan Gazit will present his paper in Hebrew. An English translation will be handed out to the participants at the start of the seminar)
Benjamin Saidel and Abed Barakat: Pillars of fertility: Spanish coins as fertility amulets among the Bedouin and Fellahin
This paper explores the use of milled Spanish coinage as fertility amulets among the Bedouin and Fellahin during the Ottoman and British Mandate Periods in Palestine. The first part of our paper will investigate how these coins, minted in the New World, arrived to the southern Levant and in what types of networks did they travel. The second part of the paper focuses on the context of use of these coins among the Bedouin and Fellahin, where the designs are reinterpreted within the local cultural context and take on a different meaning and function.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of ‘Id al-Turi.
The paper presents a research focused on a stone structure built by Salman al-Malahi, a famous Sheikh of the al-Turi family in the 1930’s, and on its close surroundings.
This locality, which is situated a few kilometers north of Beer-Sheva, was examined through the analysis of aerial photographs and censuses from the 1930’s and 1940’s, combined with an archaeological field survey, and interviews carried out in the 1990’s.
The archaeology oriented research highlights several aspects of life in the past in that region, and enables a reassessment of the archaeological method’s ability to interpret ancient remains.
Aref Abu Rabia: Nabi Musa as a common Weli between Bedouin and Fallahin
This paper will describe the common beliefs among Bedouin and Fellahin related to Nabi Musa: his prophecy and death, his wells and holy stones-bitumen. These beliefs had developed during common and private seasonal visits (zwara) as articulated during the late Ottoman and British Mandate in Palestine.
This paper will be based on first and secondary sources, interviews with tribal and fellahin leaders, key people who were active in participating in these rituals; as well as archival and documentary material, review of published and unpublished materials, books and scientific journals.
I argue that pastoral nomadism is not a separate mode of production. Pastoralists are always a specialized sector of an affluent and complex society. This implies that pastoralists (in contrast to hunters) are not self-sufficient, and cannot survive on the produce of their herds; that they take up pastoralism when there is a market for their animals and cease to raise animals when markets disappear; that specialized pastoralists depend on the settled population for nearly all the necessities of life, including their basic foods; that they are susceptible to control by the state; and that most “pastoralists” engage in a variety of economic pursuits, in order to reduce their dependence on the market and on the state. One therefore finds that most of the so-called pastoral peoples engage in pastoralism only in a limited sense and at particular times.
Until 1948, most of the Eilat region belonged to the Haywat Bedouins.
Indications of the tribe's presence and activity in the area are often
encountered during archaeological surveys, including tent remains, burials,
predator traps, scattered "Ghaza ware" pottery sherds or sometimes complete
jars, wooden bowls, millstones, layers of animal dung in corrals and even
Turkish guns (in one site).
The largest concentration of Bedouin remains was discovered in 'Uvda
Valley
(Wadi 'Uqfi), 40 km north of Eilat. Here, agricultural tools are dominant,
including iron sickles and ploughs tips, wooden pitchforks and sieves. In
the cultivated fields, on the eastern side of the valley, plough marks are
still discernible on the surface, and over 400 silos dug into the ground
represent a total storage capacity of ca. 1200 tons of grains. These
remains accord with the accounts of Musil in 1902, and others, describing
vast agricultural activity of the Haywat. In 1979 I had the opportunity to
interview four Haywat elders in 'Uvda Valley, and learned about their
methods of cultivation, harvesting and threshing cereal. This vital
information enabled comparison with the ancient agriculture of the valley
(mainly the 6th-3rd millennia B.C.).
The remains mentioned above reflect a different cultural picture than
that
often attributed to the population of the Negev and Sinai prior to the
establishment of the state of Israel.
Erin Addison: Doing With and Doing Without: water use patterns amongst the Bani Sakhr of Jordan
This paper addresses the water-use patterns of the Bani Sakhr between the Transjordanian period (1916-1946) and the present, and suggests the relevance of those patterns to water conservation and development projects in Jordan today.
The Jordanian and Palestinian plateaus on either side of the valley are riddled with ancient water systems, including cisterns capable of holding water even after 1,300 years of disuse. From 1998-2001 the Qastal Conservation & Development Project worked in part on the excavation, cleaning and rehabilitation of ancient cisterns for modern use at al-Qastal, Jordan, an important village of the `ashirat al-Fayez of Bani Sakhr. It has been well-documented that the Umayyad period cisterns were employed by the Bani Sakhr first as silage and later for waste disposal. Over the course of the project we had the opportunity not only to analyze the contents of the cisterns, but to become intimately acquainted with the community's attitudes towards water use, catchment, storage and symbology. Presently the Qastal Fayez own two of the most productive commercial 'abar (wells) in Jordan, effectively abusing the `Amman aquifer more profitably than almost any other family.
Water is valued deeply as part of the symbology of refuge and hospitality, an emblem drawn from a deep literary and religious tradition. Today it is also a profitable commodity more or less like a low-overhead crop. As recently settled Bedouin, however, the Bani Sakhr have no cultural tradition of water harvesting, storage or husbandry. Water is heavy and hard to transport: past water technology focused on transport, not catchment or storage. Bedouin water use has historically tended to focus on doing without water – which is different from water husbandry. Bedouin moved to water – they didn’t harvest and hold it.
For all practical purposes, however, Jordan's "bedouin" are now settled. With no cultural tradition of water husbandry, waste management or land management, we see both land and water exploited for personal profit and thousands of cubic meters of perfectly viable cistern space used to hold sewage. While environmentalists and planners may find attitudes such as these frustrating, there seems to be little awareness that settled Bedouin communities have no traditions with which to cope with these relatively new issues.
(Transliterations of names follow the families' own English transliterations.)
Tim Laniak: Sliding Toward Home: The Magnetism of Sedentarization
Current anthropological discussion on pastoralism in the Levant seeks to provide definitions for and clarify the historical relations between migrant/sedentary, pastoral/agricultural, and rural/urban elements. Previous analyses characterized nomadic pastoralists as rivals to settled communities. The constant tension supposed between these distinct groups led to frequent conflict and was, at times, responsible for the destabilization and even the collapse of ancient societies.
In contrast to this view, a growing tendency to identify symbiotic relations between groups and complementary relations between economic tasks is now in vogue. Various economic strategies are adopted by groups within the same larger social unit. This systemic approach assumes a continuum on which many social groups are likely to move, either towards semi-nomadic pastoralism or towards sedentarized agriculture.
The presentation will use freshly gathered ethnographic information to illustrate that the appeal of sedentarization may generally be stronger than the appeal of (semi-)nomadism. There is a tendency among (at least some) pastoralists to view land ownership as a distinct asset, a goal which many eventually achieve. It is common for transhumant groups to cultivate fields as a supplement for flock feed and for the general security that comes with economic diversification. Land ownership then often leads to other forms of settled life (formal education, regular employment). Value is increasingly given to the benefits of a stable income, insurance, medical help, and creature comforts. Although sedentarized pastoralists may idealize their previous independence – and regularly suggest that they could easily return to it – the tendency to settle is not easily reversible.
While there are numerous case studies available for research on this topic, I have chosen to interview a variety of pastoral groups in several regions of Jordan, the Negev of Israel, and in the Sinai. Because the interview sample is small, the results will serve primarily to provoke discussion. Hopefully, the diversity of the sample will compensate for its size in stimulating dialog.
To register please contact the organizers, preferably by email. The registration fee of $10 or NIS 45 can be paid upon arrival. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Benjamin Saidel: tel 054-34-54-91; email: bsaidel@albright.org.il
Eveline van der Steen: tel 066-375408; email: ejvdsteen@freeler.nl