“Reading” Ancient Landscapes: Peasant Decision-Making and Terraced Agriculture in Central Palestine over la Longue Durée

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Bethany J. Walker
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; Ecology of Land Use
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 493699283

The building of terraces is one of the most important human interventions in the landscape, which permanently transforms soils, hydrology, and the natural environment. It is a key component, in many regions, in agricultural sustainability or failure. Recent studies of agricultural terraces suggest that the construction and maintenance of terraces is a choice made by peasants and landowners, based on a range of considerations. However, the decision-making process and the mechanisms of intensification and abatement of agricultural fields in general, and terraces in particular, have not been systematically addressed to date. While we are learning much about the ideal environmental conditions of terrace-building, and the role of terraces in larger agricultural systems, we know little about the social dimension: understanding what role agricultural terraces played in society, and how social and economic systems together stood behind the decision to build, maintain, and restore terraces, on the one hand, and abandon them, on the other. To address these lacunas, the present project focuses on the social backdrop of peasant decision-making in a deep-time perspective in historical Palestine by adopting a "bottom – up" approach, examining this process in rural societies in their immediate context, and evaluating the processes of intensification and abatement of local fields. We proceed with the assumption that agricultural terraces, when dated with confidence, can serve as windows on the social, economic, and political systems of the past. We will investigate the rationale for terrace-building and use at different scales of analysis by combining the methods appropriate to field archaeology, geology, botany, food systems studies, history and historiography, and ethnography. It goes beyond the existing body of terrace scholarship in its focus on the socio-economic context of terrace construction and maintenance; multidisciplinary methods; and integration of high-resolution data sets within an agent-based model (ABM) framework, to test hypotheses regarding human behavior and decision-making. This project grows out of the convergence of two previously independent, long-term initiatives by the Universities of Bonn and Tel Aviv. The first, led by the PI, has been the fruition of two decades of archaeological fieldwork and textual analysis in Jordan and Israel. The second has been sustained research on relic terraces in the Jerusalem highlands, and their dating by OSL (optically stimulated luminescence), by a cooperative partner in Israel. Together, the results suggest a correlation between land tenure and terrace-construction, suggesting strong economic incentives for this labor-intensive work. In the project proposed here we aim to test whether these dynamics were also in place in other regions of central Palestine and in other periods, in order to identify the relationships among the factors that impacted the decision to build terraces in the past.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• International Co-Applicant: Professor Yuval Gadot, Ph.D.
• Cooperation Partner: Privatdozent Oren Gutfeld, Ph.D.