Cultivating the Hills and the Sands: A Comparative Archaeobotanical Investigation of Early Islamic Agriculture in Palestine

This article investigates how agricultural choices were driven by political, social and environmental conditions in Palestine during the Early Islamic period (c. 636–1099 CE) through the analysis of charred archaeobotanical assemblages from three archaeological sites in the southern Levant. These sites – the coastal urban centres of Ashkelon and Caesarea Maritima, and the large inland village of Neby Zakaria – are situated in different environmental settings and had distinct socioeconomic functions. Data on categories of economic plants (cereals, chaff, pulses, fruits and nuts) are aggregated from all time periods represented at each site to understand general patterns of crop presence and are examined diachronically. These data show that the production and consumption of plant resources were affected more by a settlement's socioeconomic function than by its environmental setting; in this case, urban centres specialised in perennial arboriculture and viticulture, and villages specialised in annual cultivation of cereals and pulses. Furthermore, these data suggest that there is no clear divide between cities as consumers or conduits of trade and villages as producers of agricultural products in this part of Palestine in the Early Islamic period, but this pattern needs to be tested with archaeobotanical investigations of additional sites.