The traditional landscapes of Israel, rich resources of information about particular areas, are rapidly disappearing. Soon there won’t be much left to study. Without understanding the larger landscape “sites,” towns, villages and farms are simply islands floating in an ocean of nothingness.
Archaeologists don’t generally take much interest in landscape history. True, the conventional archaeological survey has been a focus since the 1940s, but archaeology in Israel still deals mostly with settlement types (tells and villages). And landscape archaeology is different from an archaeological survey. Indeed, inadequacies in survey results actually led to a resurgence of interest in landscape archaeology.
In the 1870s Claude R. Conder and Herbert H. Kitchener of the Survey of Western Palestine first applied landscape historical analysis to this part of the world. More recently, Israeli geographers and other researchers have undertaken projects involving landscape archaeology in the Negev, the Judean Wilderness, Samaria, the central highlands, areas outside of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and elsewhere, studying the morphology of ancient agricultural field systems, irrigation systems, terraced hills, roads and paths, among other features.
The study of Israel’s landscape history came about almost accidentally. Archaeologists in the 1970s were having difficulty analyzing the masses of disconnected features that had emerged from conventional field surveys. Without a proper understanding of the landscape, they had a hard time contextualizing a given tell, village or farm. The solution to this problem, the “site in its setting” approach, has been a constant of regional archaeological projects since then. But projects that were designed specifically to study the history of landscapes have been rare.
Landscape archaeology can provide a wealth of information regarding land exploitation systems. It can be used to study the political and military uses made of a landscape (for example, battlefields), as well as the development of agricultural features frequently referred to in the Bible. Landscape archaeology can even be (and has been) used in ethnographic studies of the development of Palestinian villages.
One thing is certain: The landscapes of Israel are changing irrevocably. Nothing like this has happened before. Archaeological remains are being destroyed on a daily basis— primarily farming areas with field walls, terraces, cisterns, tracks and pathways. Farmers, building constructors, road developers and the military all contribute to this destruction.
Modern landscapes, I recognize, must change to accommodate modern needs. It is not feasible to freeze modern development in order to preserve existing landscapes. But something can be done. In the same way that reserves are created in order to allow natural habitats with their animal life to survive, I would advocate that we do the same for the various types of traditional landscapes in Israel.
Meanwhile, archaeologists must take the time to record these rapidly disappearing landscapes. If we, as archaeologists, do not record what may still be seen, eventually everything will be gone forever; the only way we will be able to look at ancient landscapes will be in aerial photographs.
There is still time— but not much.
The traditional landscapes of Israel, rich resources of information about particular areas, are rapidly disappearing. Soon there won’t be much left to study. Without understanding the larger landscape “sites,” towns, villages and farms are simply islands floating in an ocean of nothingness. Archaeologists don’t generally take much interest in landscape history. True, the conventional archaeological survey has been a focus since the 1940s, but archaeology in Israel still deals mostly with settlement types (tells and villages). And landscape archaeology is different from an archaeological survey. Indeed, inadequacies in survey results actually led to a resurgence of interest in landscape […]
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