Early Islamic Groundwater-Harvesting Plot-and-Berm Agroecosystems Along the Southeastern Mediterranean Coast: The Earliest Known Agriculture in Sand

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ABSTRACT This article discusses the archaeological, geoarchaeogical and chronological finds of our 2020–2022 fieldwork south of Caesarea, along with several archaeological and geomorphological surveys of altogether three innovative agroecosystems in the coastal sand bodies of the southeastern Mediterranean coast in Israel. The finds are hypothesised to be the first of its kind and the first major attempt to cultivate inert aeolian sand. These Early Islamic Plot-and-Berm agroecosystems perhaps heralded similar types of later traditional groundwater harvesting agrotechnologies in aeolian sand that existed along the southeastern Mediterranean coast, in Saharan Algeria, Iran and in the Atlantic coast of Iberia. The finds, combined with ongoing physical studies of the agroecosystems and their traditional analogues are anticipated to yield better understanding of the function of the agroecosystems that in turn, will provide new insights on a variety of research subjects stimulated by the database accumulated during and after our fieldwork.