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Gideon Avni

Abstract

Thousands of photographs scattered in archives across the globe depict the countryside landscapes of Syria-Palestine since the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, aerial photography in the Near East, much developed since World War I, became a useful tool for archaeologists, providing new angles for evaluating the location and distribution of ancient sites and their surrounding agricultural or steppe landscapes. These landscapes were usually understood by early travellers and explorers to reflect the authentic biblical or New Testament sceneries. Modern scholarship has occasionally adopted this approach, linking between the traditional agricultural landscapes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the remains of settlements from Roman and Byzantine periods. In sharp contrast, recent archaeological research of terraced fields produced a more reliable chronology for the development of the ancient agricultural landscapes. This paper addresses both sources, the photographic archives and the new archaeological data, as tools for reconstructing the development of agricultural landscapes in the Southern Levant from the Roman period to late medieval times. The detailed studies of terraced landscapes in the Negev Highlands and the Jerusalem area form the basis for this discussion, with additional data from other regions in Syria-Palestine.

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