Abstract
Understanding past human settlement of inhospitable regions is one of the most intriguing puzzles in archaeological research, with implications for more sustainable use of marginal regions today. During the Byzantine period in the 4th century CE, large settlements were established in the arid region of the Negev Desert, Israel, but it remains unclear why it did so, and why the settlements were abandoned three centuries later. Previous theories proposed that the Negev was a “green desert” in the early 1st millennium CE, and that the Byzantine Empire withdrew from this region due to a dramatic climatic downturn. In the absence of a local climate archive correlated to the Byzantine/Early Islamic transition, testing this theory has proven challenging. We use stable isotopic indicators of animal dietary and mobility patterns to assess the extent of the vegetative cover in the desert. By doing so, we aim to detect possible climatic fluctuations that may have led to the abandonment of the Byzantine settlements. The findings show that the Negev Desert was not greener during the time period under investigation than it is today and that the composition of the animals’ diets, as well as their grazing mobility patterns, remained unchanged through the Byzantine/Early Islamic transition. Favoring a non-climatic explanation, we propose instead that the abandonment of the Negev Byzantine settlements was motivated by restructuring of the Empire’s territorial priorities.
Highlights
Over the last 12,000 years, the Negev Desert in southern Israel has hosted an arid to hyper-arid climate, but despite the harsh living conditions, people have periodically established settlements here that have persisted for centuries[1,2]
The aim of the study is to 1) better understand the environmental conditions in which the Byzantine settlements developed, and 2) assess whether any climatic shifts may have led to the end of Byzantine presence in the Negev Desert
Horowitz[16] observed that two Early Holocene pollen sequences from the Negev Desert were composed of a more diverse assemblage of plant taxa compared to a modern pollen sequence and concluded that Negev vegetation during the Early Holocene was more extensive and varied compared to the present day
Summary
Over the last 12,000 years, the Negev Desert in southern Israel has hosted an arid to hyper-arid climate, but despite the harsh living conditions, people have periodically established settlements here that have persisted for centuries[1,2]. Between the 4th–7th centuries CE, five major Byzantine settlements – Elusa (Halutza), Subeita (Shivta), Nessana (Nitzana), Avdat (Oboda), and Mamshit (Mampsis) – flourished in the Central Negev Desert, with several smaller pastoral farms spread around the landscape[11,12] The inhabitants of these sites established a sophisticated system of water management that enabled them to capture runoff water for agricultural as well as domestic purposes. Goodfriend[17] used carbon isotopic measurements of land snails from the Negev Desert to argue that a higher proportion of the more water-demanding C3 vegetation reflected in the snail diets indicates that the region was wetter between 2800–4000 years BP compared to today In their analysis of Dead Sea lake level changes during the Holocene, Enzel et al.[18] proposed that the temporarily wetter phases documented by Goodfriend were restricted to the region of the northern Negev. The southern Negev – which has gone through its own climate history – has been arid continuously since the Late Pleistocene, as evident from the low formation of hyper-arid soils[19]
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