Pigeon-raising and sustainable agriculture at the fringe of the desert: a view from the Byzantine village of Sa‘adon, Negev, Israel

Tepper, Yotam; Weissbrod, Lior; Fried, Tal; Marom, Nimrod; Ramsay, Jennifer; Weinstein‐Evron, Mina; Aharonovich, Sophia; Farhi, Yoav; Yan, Xiaobing; Bar-Oz, Guy

doi:10.1080/00758914.2018.1528532

Cited by 19 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The water flow in the drainage channels was higher than it is today 14 , but the plant biomass production was constrained to these low-lying topographies. The wadis are where the pigeons from Shivta obtained their agricultural feed (cf Marom et al 71 , Ramsay et al 28 , Ramsay and Tepper 27 ), where higher populations of jirds (Meriones) identified in the micro-faunal assemblage from Sa'adon developed (cf Fried et al 29 , Tepper et al 72 ). This is where sheep and goats from Elusa, Nessana and Shivta obtained their C 3 vegetation during the dry summer months.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate stability and societal decline on the margins of the Byzantine empire in the Negev Desert

Vaiglova

Hartman

Marom

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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Understanding past human settlement of inhospitable regions is one of the most intriguing puzzles in archaeological research, with implications for more sustainable use of marginal regions today. During the Byzantine period in the 4 th century CE, large settlements were established in the arid region of the Negev Desert, Israel, but it remains unclear why it did so, and why the settlements were abandoned three centuries later. Previous theories proposed that the Negev was a "green desert" in the early 1 st millennium CE, and that the Byzantine Empire withdrew from this region due to a dramatic climatic downturn. In the absence of a local climate archive correlated to the Byzantine/Early Islamic transition, testing this theory has proven challenging. We use stable isotopic indicators of animal dietary and mobility patterns to assess the extent of the vegetative cover in the desert. By doing so, we aim to detect possible climatic fluctuations that may have led to the abandonment of the Byzantine settlements. The findings show that the Negev Desert was not greener during the time period under investigation than it is today and that the composition of the animals' diets, as well as their grazing mobility patterns, remained unchanged through the Byzantine/Early Islamic transition. Favoring a nonclimatic explanation, we propose instead that the abandonment of the Negev Byzantine settlements was motivated by restructuring of the Empire's territorial priorities.Over the last 12,000 years, the Negev Desert in southern Israel has hosted an arid to hyper-arid climate, but despite the harsh living conditions, people have periodically established settlements here that have persisted for centuries 1,2 . Ongoing debate has seen archaeologists, historians, and climate scientists speculate whether the rise and fall of human habitation was caused by fluctuations in climatic conditions, or whether it was primarily driven by changes in the socio-political organization of the communities living in these environmentally marginal areas 3-7 . Palaeoenvironmental studies have contributed to this debate by providing a long-term perspective on climate fluctuations in the region. However, in order to understand the human response to these patterns on short-term (i.e. centennial) scales and ground the trends in specific micro-regional settings, archaeological proxies need to be studied from contexts that bracket the cultural events under consideration 8 .One of the most significant phases of population expansion in the Negev Desert started in the 3 rd century BCE with the establishment of the Nabatean kingdom. After the kingdom was annexed and subsumed into the Roman empire in 106 CE, it reached its height with the spread of Christianity during the Byzantine period in the 4 th -6 th century CE and was subsequently abandoned around the time of the Muslim conquest of the region in the 7 th century CE 9,10 . Between the 4 th -7 th centuries CE, five major Byzantine settlements -Elusa (Halutza), Subeita (Shivta), Nessana (Nitzana), Avdat (Oboda)...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate stability and societal decline on the margins of the Byzantine empire in the Negev Desert

Vaiglova

Hartman

Marom

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…Excavations in the Shivta and Sa'adon dovecotes comprised exposure of trenches bisecting the structures. In structure A of Sa'adon, Byzantine period coins were uncovered near wall foundations indicating the time of construction [ 35 ]. A short succession, approximately 30 cm thick and composed of two layers ( figure 2 : loci 107 and 108), was exposed directly above the bedrock floor of this structure and below collapse debris from its upper part, including wall stones and roof slabs ( figure 2 : locus 103).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This was indicated by large amounts of pigeon ( Columba livia ) bones and dung [ 33 , 34 ]. Two additional dovecotes were excavated in 2011 near the site of Sa'adon, located approximately 10 km north of Shivta in a dune area [ 35 ]. A human occupation layer similar to the one uncovered in structure 6 of Shivta was exposed in a square-shaped dovecote in Sa'adon (structure B).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A glimpse of an ancient agricultural ecosystem based on remains of micromammals in the Byzantine Negev Desert

Fried¹,

Weissbrod²,

Tepper³

et al. 2018

R. Soc. open sci.

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It is widely believed that Byzantine agriculture in the Negev Desert (fourth to seventh century Common Era; CE), with widespread construction of terraces and dams, altered local landscapes. However, no direct evidence in archaeological sites yet exists to test this assumption. We uncovered large amounts of small mammalian remains (rodents and insectivores) within agricultural installations built near fields, providing a new line of evidence for reconstructing anthropogenic impact on local habitats. Abandonment layers furnished high abundances of remains, whereas much smaller numbers were retrieved from the period of human use of the structures. Digestion marks are present in low frequencies (20% of long bones and teeth), with a light degree of impact, which indicate the role of owls (e.g. Tyto alba) as the principal means of accumulation. The most common taxa—gerbils (Gerbillus spp.) and jirds (Meriones spp.)—occur in nearly equal frequencies, which do not correspond with any modern Negev communities, where gerbils predominate in sandy low-precipitation environments and jirds in loessial, higher-precipitation ones. Although low-level climate change cannot be ruled out, the results suggest that Byzantine agriculture allowed jirds to colonize sandy anthropogenic habitats with other gerbilids and commensal mice and rats.

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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%

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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Pigeon-raising and sustainable agriculture at the fringe of the desert: a view from the Byzantine village of Sa‘adon, Negev, Israel

Cited by 19 publications

References 35 publications

Climate stability and societal decline on the margins of the Byzantine empire in the Negev Desert

Climate stability and societal decline on the margins of the Byzantine empire in the Negev Desert

A glimpse of an ancient agricultural ecosystem based on remains of micromammals in the Byzantine Negev Desert

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

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