Grape pits show how ancient Christian villages in the Negev rose and fell

Around 1,600 years ago, prosperous communities lived in the highlands of the Negev desert. Comprised of a few thousand individuals – Elusa, considered the metropolis of the Negev at the time, probably reached 10,000 or 15,000 inhabitants – they thrived around the beautiful churches they built and practiced flourishing agriculture, growing cereals, fruit trees and, vineyards. By analyzing ancient plant remains and other archaeological artifacts, researchers have been able to document the rise of this society's market-based economy, as well as its fall around the middle of the 6th century, which might have been caused by a combination of a pandemic, political tensions and climate change. “I think it is fascinating to see how such a long time later we are still affected by similar challenges,” Daniel Fuks, lead co-author of the paper published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), told The Jerusalem Post. The mosaic of Kissufim near Gaza, depicting Orbikon the camel driver, captures the overland transport of the products of viticulture in the region during Late Antiquity. Artifactual remnants of the two main components of Orbikon's load – grapes and Gaza jars – further illuminate this phenomenon. (Israel Museum of Jerusalem) Fuks, a PhD student in the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, led the study as a researcher in Prof. Ehud Weiss' Archaeobotany Lab, and as a team member of the Negev Byzantine Bio-Archaeology Research Program, “Crisis on the Margins of the Byzantine Empire”, headed by Prof. Guy Bar-Oz of the University of Haifa. The question of how agriculture was practiced in antiquity in an arid place that still presents challenges today has intrigued scholars for years. “These communities practiced desert runoff farming, which depended on trapping runoff water coming down from the slopes into wadi beds and then slowing the flow of water through check dams,” Fuks explained. “They were thus able to collect water from an area 20 times bigger than the fields they cultivated.” The researcher pointed out that in a region where the average rainfall is thought to have been about 100 mm. per year, the farmers managed to gather the equivalent of over 500 mm annually in the wadi beds, which allowed them to grow all types of produce, including cereals and grapes. The runoff also provided another key element for practicing agriculture which is not easily found in a rocky desert: soil. A third element, fertilizer, was obtained by using pigeon droppings, as testified by the numerous pigeon tower remains found in the settlements. The farmers of the Negev also raised sheep and goats, among other livestock. Proving how the communities were part of a commercial network that extended beyond the desert, numerous fish bones were also found in the sites, imported from other locations, possibly using the very same type of jars that were used to transport wine. Understanding the trends in the production of grapes offered the researchers a tool to document the life and the economy of those communities. The group considered 11 trash pits in the settlements of Elusa, Shivta and Nessana. “Your trash says a lot about you. In the ancient trash mounds of the Negev, there is a record of residents' daily lives – in the form of plant remains, animal remains, ceramic sherds, and more,” Bar-Oz said in a press release. “In the 'Crisis on the Margins' project, we excavated these mounds to uncover the human activity behind the trash, what it included, when it flourished, and when it declined.” Among the findings were a vast number of grape pips. “Identifying seed and fruit remains is a unique capability of our lab,” Weiss pointed out, “and it relies on the Israel National Reference Collection of Plant Seeds and Fruit held in our lab, and on years of experience in retrieving, processing, and analyzing plant remains from sites of all periods in Israeli archaeology.” As explained by Fuks, analyzing the proportion between grape pips and cereal grains is meaningful because major changes in those ratios reflect the extent to which grapes were grown as cash crops. Previous scholars proposed that the luxury 'Gaza wine' attested to in Byzantine texts and shipped all over the empire was produced also in the Negev. However, previous evidence for Negev viticulture was not indicative of an economy of scale. The findings of the study registered a significant rise in the ratio of grape pips to cereal grains between the fourth century and mid-sixth century CE – providing unprecedented evidence for a commercial scale of viticulture in the Negev – and then a sharp decline. Similar results were obtained in a parallel analysis focused on the types of pottery amphorae used during those centuries. Fuks and Dr. Tali Erickson-Gini, an expert in the field, found that while in the earlier period Gaza wine jars, whose elongated and thin shape made them suitable to be transported by camel, were more common, later on bulky bag-shaped jars became prevalent. Both observations support the idea that, around the middle of the sixth century, the Christian communities in the Negev experienced a sharp decline, about a century before the Islamic conquest, which was once generally considered what caused the fall of the settlements. “Many different events happened during that period and therefore we cannot point out what exactly caused the decline, but it likely was some combination, or domino effect, of all of them,” Fuks told the Post. In 541 CE, the Byzantine Empire was struck by a terrible plague, which was contracted by Emperor Justinian himself, who managed to survive. The scholar explained that while it is not clear how the pandemic affected the Negev, it is likely that not only infected and killed a part of its population, but also triggered negative economic consequences, making the luxury Gaza wine less of a requested commodity. Moreover, two volcanic eruptions around 535-536 and 539 produced what is known as”'the Late Antique Little Ice Age,” which brought forth the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years in the Northern Hemisphere. “While in Europe we know that this caused a major drought, we are not sure what happened in the Levant. The theory I support is that it actually generated a significant increase in precipitation and flash floods, which might have damaged the runoff system,” Fuks said. Finally, as has happened through history up to present times, a blow to the prosperous economy might have been given by political tensions, and especially by the unrest that followed Justinian's death in 565, the researcher pointed out. For the future, Fuks explained that he is working on exploring both long-term and short-term agricultural developments in the Negev Highlands and the adjacent Aravah valley during the first millennium CE. “This region, and the field of archaeobotany, offer the opportunity to look at agriculture from the three dimensions of time that I consider essential: seasonal rhythms of daily life, decadal-centennial economic and social change, and innovations which have a lasting impact over the course of millennia,” he concluded.

Grape pits show how ancient Christian villages in the Negev rose and fell

The question of how agriculture was practiced in antiquity in an arid place that still presents challenges today has intrigued scholars for years.

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Grape pits show how ancient Christian villages in the Negev rose and fell

The question of how agriculture was practiced in antiquity in an arid place that still presents challenges today has intrigued scholars for years.

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