Neil MANSPEIZER, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Arnon KARNIELI, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Besides ancient agricultural installations carved into the bedrock, the modern vegetation may represent the sole in-situ permanent event expression of long-term human relationship with landscape in the Judean foothills of Israel. Geographers who plot human-environmental change trajectories are challenged by comparison of qualitative and quantitative datasets, such as long-term landuse and the modern landcover, but these 'apples and oranges' also provide an existing geoarchaeological rational for the model. GIS was used to develop a spatial database that consisted of three main sources: (1) remotely sensed data; (2) a British survey map of Palestine; and (3) Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) archaeological surveys. Garrigue and maquis vegetation units were chosen as indicators of the landscape dynamics, specifically agricultural changes and landuse intensity, since they had already been described as products of human-induced or natural driving forces of change. IAA survey data included all settlement records from the 4th c. BCE to the 20th c. CE and the three historical periods with most intense agricultural landuse: Hellenistic (olive oil presses), Byzantine (wine presses) and Ottoman (animal pens). Trend surface images were interpolated in GIS based on distance from the agricultural installations surveyed from those three periods. A cumulative landuse intensity image (of the three periods combined) was cross tabulated separately with landcover classifications from the 1947 British map and 2020 landcover classification. The two results concur and indicate that long-term landuse had significant impact on modern landcover. Areas of more intense ancient landuse demonstrate barer modern landcover compared with areas of less intense landuse that contain woody cover, such as shrub and tree. These results are significant because they identify a landuse legacy in garrigue and maquis units but more significantly they embody the spatial-temporal complexity of the landscape.
Keywords: geoarchaeology|qualitative GIS|agricultural change|historical mapping|landuse legacy
A102918NM