What Makes a Village?: Social Networks and Resilience
Life on the Farm in Late Medieval Jerusalem - The Village of Beit Mazmil, its Occupants and their Industry over Five Centuries - Bethany J. Walker
Bethany J. Walker [+]
University of Bonn
View Website
Prof. Dr. Bethany J. Walker (PhD 1998, University of Toronto, Islamic art and archaeology) – Co-Director of the Khirbet Beit Mazmīl excavations and Co-PI of the Medieval Jerusalem Hinterland Project. Research Professor of Mamluk Studies and Director of the Research Unit of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn (Germany). Author of Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago, 2011), editor of Reflections of Empire: Archaeological and Ethnographic Studies on the Pottery of the Ottoman Levant (Boston, 2009), and author of 65 scholarly articles. Founding editor of the Journal of Islamic Archaeology (Equinox) and Co-editor of Equinox’s Monographs in Islamic Archaeology. In 2023 the American Schools of Overseas Research awarded her the P. E. MacAllister Field Archaeology Award for her career-long outstanding contributions to ancient Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean archaeology.
Description
This concluding chapter extracts “lessons learned” about the ways local communities have historically participated in market agriculture, their reasons for developing the land, and how they came to control, in modest but important ways, food production. It is theory-based and connects to contemporary scholarship on food security and sustainable agriculture.