PI: Kathleen Forste

The overarching goal of this comparative project is to study 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 archaeological plant remains (seeds, plant parts, wood charcoal) and relevant documentary and literary sources.

Towards this goal, multiple lines of archaeological evidence are combined to investigate:

  • How does agricultural production vary between urban and rural settlements?
  • How was the agricultural landscape developed and managed during this period? How did people maintain, or enhance, the productivity of their land?
  • What is the spatial organization of plant use (storage, processing, cooking, discard) within individual settlements?
  • How does the agricultural economy of a settlement intersect with other economic sectors (labor, craft, merchant, timber, etc)?

Currently, work is being undertaken to expand this dataset to include more sites (both urban and rural) across the southern Levant, to investigate the spatial organization of cereal processing, to investigate the intersection of agricultural and craft economies, and to build its reference collection.

This research is conducted with Tel Shimron Excavations, the Caesarea Coastal Archaeological Project, TERRSOC/Khirbet Beit Loya, and the Expedition to Ashkelon, and in collaboration with the IAA.

Recent findings:

 

Students involved in these research projects are supported by Brown Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRAs).


Project 1. Archaeobotanical Evidence of Agricultural Practices in the Late Antique and Medieval Mediterranean
Students: Katharine Knowles, Mariia Dzhelmach
Project Description:
This project is a first step towards creating a reference database for interpreting archaeological plant data, specifically collating information on wild seeds to use as a proxy to study ecological conditions (e.g., soil types, humidity levels) and seasonality of agricultural tasks (e.g., planting, harvesting). The undergraduate researcher will work with published archaeobotanical references and comparative specimens to (1) index wild plants and crops identified archaeologically, (2) assist in management of comparative collections, (3) assist in identifying archaeological plant remains. Through this work the undergraduate researcher will receive hands-on training in archaeological science and will contribute to active archaeological research of agricultural change. This project is part of a larger comparative study of agricultural systems across the eastern and western Mediterranean during the late antique and medieval periods (4 th –13 th centuries). During this time, there is a generalized, large-scale pattern of new crops and irrigation technology being introduced across the Mediterranean from the Middle East. It is not clear how individual communities adopted or rejected these new introductions, but archaeological investigations of plant remains from individual sites can trace these changes and help us understand the agricultural choices people made in the past.

Project 2. Spatial and Statistical Investigations of Plant-Use Areas in Archaeological Sites
Student: Peri Ferguson
Project Description:
This project is part of a larger archaeological investigation into agricultural economies in the Levant during the Early Islamic period (c. 636–1100 CE). The goal is to trace the spatial distribution of archaeological plant remains in order to study the organization of crop processing activities at a farming village. Such intrasite analysis provides data to begin to understand how agricultural labor at the village was organized, and the wider network of agricultural provisioning connected to cities. Towards this goal, the student researcher will conduct spatial analyses (such as the creation of heatmaps or similar visualizations) and will conduct statistical analyses in graphical representation (e.g., triplots, biplots, box plots, etc) to elucidate patterns of plant deposition across archaeological spaces. The student will also engage in literature review and compile a spreadsheet recording the occurrence of certain plants in certain contexts in other archaeological sites, in order to create a corpus of comparative depositional information to trace spatial patterns of plant use.