TY - JOUR
T1 - Land management and the construction of terraces for dry farming
T2 - The case of Soreq catchment, Israel
AU - Elgart-Sharon, Yelena
AU - Porat, Naomi
AU - Gadot, Yuval
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2020/8/1
Y1 - 2020/8/1
N2 - The construction of terrace walls for dry farming in the highlands of the Levant was traditionally associated with demographic growth that caused pressure on available land for cultivation. In this paper we suggest an alternative model and claim that terraces were adopted as a subsistence strategy at periods when land ownership was centralized in the hands of either powerful landowners or managed through complex family-based cooperation like the Musha system of the Late Antiquity period. This claim is based both on the study of land use and settlement patterns within the Upper Nahal Soreq, north-west of Jerusalem, where close to 350 excavated or surveyed sites of all kinds were catalogued and mapped, and on the results of an OSL dating project that directly dated the construction of terrace walls for dry farming in the highlands of Jerusalem in general and at the Upper Nahal Soreq catchment in particular.
AB - The construction of terrace walls for dry farming in the highlands of the Levant was traditionally associated with demographic growth that caused pressure on available land for cultivation. In this paper we suggest an alternative model and claim that terraces were adopted as a subsistence strategy at periods when land ownership was centralized in the hands of either powerful landowners or managed through complex family-based cooperation like the Musha system of the Late Antiquity period. This claim is based both on the study of land use and settlement patterns within the Upper Nahal Soreq, north-west of Jerusalem, where close to 350 excavated or surveyed sites of all kinds were catalogued and mapped, and on the results of an OSL dating project that directly dated the construction of terrace walls for dry farming in the highlands of Jerusalem in general and at the Upper Nahal Soreq catchment in particular.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088304064&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/ojoa.12201
DO - 10.1111/ojoa.12201
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AN - SCOPUS:85088304064
SN - 0262-5253
VL - 39
SP - 274
EP - 289
JO - Oxford Journal of Archaeology
JF - Oxford Journal of Archaeology
IS - 3
ER -