This communication is an outgrowth of archaeological research on the
Ottoman period in Central Transjordan carried out over the past three decades
by members of the Madaba Plains Project. A consistent goal of this project
has been to advance understanding of all historical periods encountered
in materials uncovered by regional surveys and excavations undertaken by
the team. To this end a methodological approach has been adopted which gives
priority to investigation of the inputs to, operation of, and outputs from,
the local food system. As this is a research problem which is equally applicable
to all historical periods, it has led to concern also with the Ottoman period.
My goal in this communication is to lay open for criticism and discussion
some thoughts about possible future directions for research on the Ottoman
period which flow from this concern with understanding the dynamics of local
food systems. I see three interrelated lines of inquiry in this regard:
First, to ascertain the influence of Ottoman policies and imperial agents
on the operation of particular local food systems. Second, to examine the
response of the indigenous population to such policies and agents. And third,
to investigate the ways in which local ecosystems influenced, and were influenced
by, peoples' food-getting activates throughout the Ottoman period. Of course,
these objectives should be pursued with as much chronological specificity
as is at all feasible.
In this communication my aim is to present the case for a food systems
approach to the archaeology of the Ottoman Empire. While this may strike
some as being a very limited perspective, I shall try to show the opposite,
namely that such an approach provides a powerful methodology both for investigating
the "Ottoman period" as a historical era in its own right and
for making the archaeology of this era relevant to a much broader scholarly
audience{1}.
The case will be developed in the following manner: First comes a brief
review of some background assumptions and definitions pertinent to understanding
what is meant by a "food systems approach." This is followed by
a discussion of macro-level issues having to do with how archaeologists
think about and investigate the influence of Ottoman imperial interventions
on the operation of local food systems. Next come some thoughts on some
micro-level issues related to carrying out archaeological research on local
food systems, particularly as it relates to understanding the response of
indigenous peoples to Ottoman policies and interventions. Thereafter I discuss
briefly some implicatons of the food system concept for understanding the
impact of the Ottoman centuries on the local environment. The conclusion
offers some reflections on the promise of a food systems approach to making
the archaeology of the Ottoman Empire relevant to global archaeology and
world history.
The first and most basic reason for why a methodology which is explicitly
concerned with people's quest for food needs to be reckoned with by Ottoman
archaeologists is that, throughout most of human history, it has shaped
the daily lives of the vast majority of human beings. Furthermore, attention
focused on this quest leads inevitably to concern with the lives of the
rural masses living in the shadow of empire. And since the lives of most
elites in the past depended, directly or indirectly, upon various mechanisms
for inducing the rural masses to produce a surplus of food, a food systems
perspective provides a window on their lives as well.
What is meant by a food systems approach is something far broader than
a concern simply with what people eat! This becomes clearer as one reflects
on the implications of the following definition of the food system concept:
A food system is a dynamic and complex unity consisting of all the purposive,
patterned and inter-dependent symbolic and instrumental activities carried
out by people in order to procure, process, distribute, store, prepare,
consume, metabolize and dispose of food.{2}
The implications of this definition are manifold. To begin with, it
provides a common frame of reference for thinking about all historical periods--the
palaeolithic through the present. An important benefit of this is that it
makes possible temporal comparison of food system processes. This is because
local food systems are never static, but are always undergoing some sort
of change. Such change is either in the direction of intensification or
abatement depending on changes over time in the intensity with which a given
local region is being exploited in order to provide people with food.
Generally, as a region's food system intensifies, its inhabitants tend to
become increasingly land-tied due to increased investment in plough agriculture.
Consequently their residential patterns tend to become more sedentary. Intensification,
therefore, normally is accompanied by sedentarization. Abatement
is said to occur when a given region's inhabitants diminish their reliance
on plough agriculture in favor of livestock production within a given territory
or homeland. This generally involves adoption of more mobile residential
patterns, or nomadization, whereby people, for the sake of their
increased investment in pasture animals, turn to seasonal migration between
watering places, ploughlands and pasturelands within a given territorial
homeland. Such shifts occurred ubiquitously throughout rural landscape of
the Middle East in the distant past, and surely also during the Ottoman
period.
This leads to a second advantage of the food system concept, namely the
fact that it brings under a common analytical frame of reference the various
strategies employed by people to procure food --hunting, gathering, farming,
herding, and trade. This makes the concept much less limiting than, for
example, the concept of 'agriculture' which tends to be associated with
sedentary production of crops and husbandry animals. More often than not,
when investigation of food getting practices is carried out under the heading
of agriculture, it tends to lead to superficial or altogether inadequate
consideration of the role of other methods of food procurement.{3}
A third advantage of the food system approach is that it leads automatically
to a concern with how rural landscapes were utilized by people in order
to procure food. It thus focuses investigation on patterns of landuse and
settlement in the hinterlands of human settlements. In other words, it forces
the archaeologist to get off of her archaeological mound and out into the
surrounding fields as a natural and complementary dimension of her research
activities.
Mention must also be made of the utility of the food system concept when
it comes to fitting together and interpreting the results of archaeological
excavations and surveys. In this regard, the above-stated definition leads
one to understand more clearly the function of a wide range of rural structures
(used for housing and protecting food producing households, storing their
food and protecting their animals); pottery (used for storing, serving,
distributing and serving food); stone objects (used mostly in some way in
connection with food preparation); and animal and plant remains occur as
they do in the archaeological record. The concept also helps link discoveries
made by means of archaeological excavations to those made by means of regional
surveys in the hinterland of a particular dig site.
There is much more that could be said with regard to all of the above points,
and other points could easily be added to bolster the case for using a food
systems approach when doing archaeology. What has been said, however, should
suffice to give an idea of the scope of the concept and its relevance for
understanding the activities of the rural masses and the elites of the Ottoman
Empire.
One of the intriguing questions which follow from a food systems approach
to the history and archaeology of the Ottoman Empire is the extent to which
it is possible to distinguish analytically the salient features of an imperial
food system? In other words, can we speak of an imperial Ottoman food system
just like today reference is made to "the global food system"
(Warnack 1987) or the "American food system" (Bodley 1996)
In certain ways, this question has already been answered in the affirmative
by economic and social historians who have examined the development and
implementation of economic policies by various Ottoman sultans and their
administrations (c.f. Issawi 1980; Inalcik 1983). There is a need, however,
for closer cooperation between historians and archaeologists in addressing
questions about the actual impact of such imperial policies on the grass-roots
level of local food systems throughout the empire. Cooperation is needed,
for example, to answer questions about the grass- roots impact of sporadic
initiatives to improve the rural infrastructure necessary to protect, transport
and sell agricultural commodities; to promote production and export of certain
specific agricultural products from particular local regions; to regulate
the migration of agricultural laborers in and out of a particular local
region; to intervene in the pricing of agricultural products; and to impose
various forms of taxation and tariffs on the population of particular localities.
A complicating factor, in this regard, is the emergence during the Ottoman
Era of the capitalist world system (Wallerstein 1990). What is complicating
about this development is that it makes it harder to ascertain whether increases
in production and export of agricultural commodities at the grass roots
level were the result of successfully enacted imperial policies or local
entrepreneurial initiatives responding to new opportunities created by the
rise of the capitalist world system. For example, a compelling case for
the role of the capitalist market in stimulating the development of large-scale
commercial agriculture in the Ottoman Empire has recently been published
in a collection of papers edited by Keyder and Tabak (1991).
Our efforts on the Madaba Plains Project to document the grass roots impact
of Ottoman agrarian policies have involved three main lines of inquiry{4}.
The first has been documentary research by members of our team aimed at
reconstructing the history of re-settlement and economic growth inside our
project area over the past century and a half (Russell 1989; Abujaber 1989;
LaBianca 1990: 53-106){5}. Sources for this history have included imperial
and local government administrative records; the accounts of nineteenth
century geographers and travelers to our project area; family archives of
early settlers; and interviews with elderly local residents.
The second line of inquiry has involved attempts to learn more about the
history of rural buildings in our project area from the Ottoman period such
as the fortified residential compounds known locally as qusur or qasr (LaBianca
1990: 201-232). One of these appear to be over two hundred years old, namely
the one located near Ain Hesban which belongs to the Adwan tribe--a tribe
whose ancestors existed in Jordan throughout the entire Ottoman period.
It served as a sort of headquarters for the tribe, having been one of the
residences of the tribal chieftain.
The third line of inquiry has involved the use of a metal detector to search
for coins from the Ottoman period throughout our project area. A major reason
for implementing this procedure was because of the disappointing results
of all other archaeological attempts to discover finds which could be clearly
associated with initiatives of the imperial Ottoman administration. We started
this procedure in the summer of 1994 and found over three dozen coins as
a result, many of which could be positively identified as being from the
Ottoman period (Bochenski, 1994, personal communication).
When the results of the various archaeological undertakings mentioned above
are brought together they contribute preciously little in the way of direct
archaeological evidence for Ottoman imperial intervention in the project
area{6}. There are no official buildings or public works which can be identified
as having been built because of Ottoman imperial interventions in the area.
The only tangible evidence of any kind linked more or less directly to the
imperial powers are coins. When it comes to indirect evidence, however,
the picture is different. For example, the very fact that villages and towns
came into existence again in the project area toward the end of the nineteenth
century--after four centuries during which there were apparently no permanently
lived-in towns or villages in the project area--is attributed by many contemporary
witnesses to renewed efforts by imperial Ottoman rulers to provide protection
for agricultural villagers and townspeople as far away as Central Transjordan.
One could infer from this, therefore, that during the earlier centuries
of Ottoman administration there was little or no initiative on the part
of the imperial administration to promote the welfare of settled folk, whereas
toward the end of the nineteenth and during the early twentieth century
many pro-settler initiatives were implemented.
Interestingly, these late Ottoman imperial interventions aimed at fostering
settlement of villages and towns appear to have gone hand in hand with efforts
on the part of local entrepreneurs to cash in on the rising demand for grain
brought about by the rapidly expanding capitalist market economy (c.f Abujaber
1989; Schilcher 1991). Thus, even as far away as Central Transjordan, one
can detect the dual influences of the imperial Ottoman administration and
the emerging capitalist world economy. From this particular case it would
appear, in fact, that the interventions of the Ottoman imperial administration
were intended to promote--whether by design or accident--linkage of the
grain markets of Transjordan with those of the capitalist world economy.
As important to our understanding of the Ottoman Empire food system
as is the concern with imperial policies and interventions is the need to
grasp the response of indigenous residents to their predicament as subjects.
In this respect, a distant backwater in the imperial landscape such as Transjordan
provides a particularly good opportunity, although the phenomenon of resistance
was surely widespread throughout the empire. It appear, however, that the
region of greater Syria--which typically includes Transjordan--was a region
in which resistance was rampant. Writes Schilcher (1991: 195):
"The fact that Syria's peasantry continued to rebel, generation after
generation, is perhaps the strongest indication that something in their
local social, economic, and political arrangements sustained them and gave
them the aspiration and motivation to continue the struggle. How else can
we explain the fact that the Syrian peasantry of the late Ottoman period
retained a stronger bargaining position vis-a-vis the government and vis-a-
vis interlopers than was retained by peasantries of peripheralized economies
elsewhere in the region, or, for that matter, in many parts of the world?"
What, then, is this "something" which has sustained the inhabitants
of Transjordan in their quiet resistence against Ottoman policies and interventions
in their homelands. It is, as we shall see, a particular cluster of sentiments
and practices--a set of indigenous hardiness structures--by means of which
the inhabitants of this area have become inured to fatique and hardship
and thus have managed to persist and at times prosper despite greatly fluctuating
political and economic fortunes.{7}" Thus far we have been able to
delineate at least seven such hardiness structures--all of which have been
integral to local resistence. Important in this regard has been their role
in facilitating movement by individual households and larger groups along
the sedentarization-nomadization continuum. I turn next to briefly describing
each one of these seven secret weapons of the indigenous resistence.
Tribalism. First, and most important by far, have been their kin-based
social networks as members of large extended families and tribes. These
kin-based networks have provided shepherds and farmers alike with a highly
flexible mechanism for welding people together for their common good, whether
on the open range as groups of nomads or on cultivated lands as members
of villages and towns. It has provided a means by which small groups of
kin have been able to adjust successfully not only to a fragile natural
environment, but also to shifting political landscapes and very uncertain
economic conditions.
Multi-resource economy. Another secret of their survival has been
their mixing of production of cereals and tree fruits with raising of sheep,
goats, donkeys and camels. This ancient agricultural regime, which goes
back at least five thousand years, has helped them to easily shift back
and forth between agricultural and pastoral pursuit. They have thus been
able to adjust their livelihoods to maximize chances of survival in the
face of constantly shifting economic and political conditions.
Fluid homeland territories. In order to pursue such a variety of
economic options, both settled and nomadic tribes have tended to maintain
fluid homeland territories. Although a somewhat fixed center of gravity
may have prevailed at any given point in history, the outer boundaries of
homeland territories have been allowed to continually change in order to
accommodate new social, economic or environmental realities.
Residential flexibility. Over the centuries people have used stone
houses, residential caves and tents to live in. As the population has sedentarized
or nomadized, the amount of time they spend living in one or another of
these residences in any particular year would vary.
Small-scale water sourcing. Because of the risks involved in constructing
and maintaining the sorts of elaborate water works developed, for example,
by the ancient Romans, the indigenous population has for the most part relied
on small-scale water sourcing arrangements--access to natural springs and
streams and re-use of ancient cisterns.
Hospitality. The emphasis on hospitality for which the Arab population
of Jordan is famous has its roots in more than good manners. By means of
their generosity to fellow tribesmen and strangers, people have been able
to accumulate I-owe-you's which can be banked until such a time as a pay-back
favor can come in handy. Also, by means of hospitality, information which
is vital to their existence as shepherds and farmers may be shared.
Honor. The institution of honor, whereby members of families and
tribes demonstrate their solidarity with eachother as a group of kin, also
has a very practical function in tribal society. Its built-in system of
rewards and punishments serve to assure that individuals and families don't
shirk their obligations toward one another as kin. Cooperation in feuds
is only one of many examples of the operation of this institution at work.
The point to be stressed here is that all of these practices and institutions
have evolved and persisted at the grass-roots level in Jordan over a very
long time. In other words, they did not come about just because of the nominal
Ottoman occupation of the country. Indeed, these structures were all well
in place by the time of the first world empires in the ancient Near East
in the third millennium B.C. In the particular case of Transjordan they
have become particularly deeply ingrained in the collective memory of the
country's inhabitants as a result of three synergistically related uncertainty
producing factors: namely the unpredictability of the annual rainfall; the
frontier conditions created by the country's proximity of the Arabian and
Syrian desert; and its position astride a much fought over intercontinental
landbridge. This third factor accounts for why the country has experienced
almost continuous foreign domination since the second millennium B.C.
Pivotal to the research which has led to the delineation of these indigenous
hardiness structures has been the same food system perspective which guided
our research on imperial intervention in the local situation. It was this
perspective, for instance, that led us to concentrate effort and time on
trying to understand the "gaps" in the occupational history of
Tell Hesban. These were the centuries during which nothing or very little
in the way of accumulation of occupational debris occurred on the tell.
Significantly, the most recent such "gap" was that between the
strata representing the Mamluk and the early modern period--the centuries
of Ottoman domination.
To discover how people managed to meet their basic needs for food, water
and shelter during this most recent "gap period" we launched a
survey aimed specifically at learning more about the history of migratory
food production or transhumance in our project area. This, in turn, led
quickly to the discovery of the crucial role which habitation caves had
played in people's lives during the Ottoman period. To learn more about
these and life in general during these centuries, we began to carry out
extensive interviews with older residents who remembered having lived in
the caves when they were younger. Thus, gradually the clues to their hardy
existence--as represented in these seven structures--began to come to light{8}.
As for the obvious question of why the majority of local residents chose
not to live permanently in villages and towns throughout most of the Ottoman
centuries, the answer is that it didn't make much sense in this particular
corner of the empire! To do so meant being constantly harassed either by
imperial Ottoman taxation officials or by enemy tribesmen. Consequently
people opted to resist by following the time-honored practice of living
lightly and simply on the land. In other words they opted to seek shelter
in tents, caves and abandoned ruins and to rely on pasture animals and cereals
produced during winter months in the fertile valleys behind their seasonal
cave villages. In an indirect sort of way, this situation adds further to
our understanding of the agrarian policies of the imperial Ottoman administration!
There is one more important line of research which a food systems approach
facilitates, and that is inquiry concerned with the human impact in a given
locality on the natural environment and visa versa. What makes this approach
particularly helpful in this regard is that, as a methodological framework,
it has its roots in ecosystem theory. Thus it leads naturally to a concern
with short and long-term changes in the natural environment and the role
of humans in bringing them about.
Some intriguing questions arise in this regard when attention is focused
on the Ottoman period. For instance, is it fair to assume as some scholars
have that the natural environment simply deteriorated in Palestine throughout
the Islamic centuries? Is it possible that a certain amount of regeneration
of the environment might have occurred as a result of the low intensity
with which at least the Transjordanian landscape was exploited during most
of this era?
What a food systems approach provides is a set of hypothesis about the
processes by which the environment gradually was changed to how it appears
today. It posits that such change occurred in large measure as a result
of the cyclic episodes of intensification and abatement in the local food
system-- accompanied as these were by cycles of sedentarization and nomadization.
It posits further that as each such episode took place, it set in motion
spasms of rapid environmental degradation followed by rest periods during
which the landscape underwent partial regeneration. The present-day rather
barren appearance of the landscape of Transjordan is thus the cumulative
result of multiple such spasms and rests over the past ten thousand years.
To what extent the Ottoman centuries added to this cumulative impact remains
very much an empirical question{9}.
I would like to end this communication by contributing some thoughts
on the "questions for discussion" supplied by Uzi Baram in preparation
for this conference on Ottoman Archaeology. To begin with, I believe firmly
that archaeologists working on the Ottoman Empire can reach across the distances
which separate theme in terms of location of their projects and time periods
of interest. One way to do so--although certainly not the only way--is by
means of a common concern with local food systems. This approach also has
the merit that it links the concerns of Ottoman archaeologists with those
of global archaeology and world history.
As for the question regarding whether the archaeology of the Ottoman Empire
should be regarded as the archaeology of an empire or a time period, my
view is that it should be both. Surely archaeologists working anywhere in
the empire must be concerned with looking for subtle and obvious signs of
imperial intervention in their localities. Such interventions may be more
pronounced during some time periods than during others, thus the temporal
dimension is also going to be crucial. In the case of our Transjordanian
test case, it seems one can never quite eliminate from the picture the existence
of the empire, for as we have seen, its policies appear to have had a lot
to do with how people lived throughout the entire period of the empire's
existence.
About the relevance of archaeology of the Ottoman period to archaeologies
of the more distant past and to mainstream Middle Eastern archaeology there
can be no doubt. Again, from the vantage point of our work in Jordan, what
we have learned about "people living lightly on the land" from
our research on the Ottoman centuries has been essential to developing hypothesis
and research strategies for studying earlier episodes of low intensity occupation
in our project area. The importance of the Ottoman period for mainstream
Middle Eastern archaeology, therefore, lies in that it offers a near-at-hand
opportunity--in terms of data accessibility--for archaeologists to learn
about the dynamics of pre-industrial complex society in the Middle East.
Research on this era is also essential to archaeological undertakings which
take seriously the challenge of advancing understanding of long-term patterns
of cultural change throughout the world.
There can also be little doubt about the relevance of Ottoman archaeology
for the current debate on the aims and political uses of archaeology. One
of the valuable contributions of the post-modern critique is precisely the
fact that it has brought to our attention the Eurocentric bias of traditional
orientalist archaeology. It is precisely this bias which has caused Ottoman
archaeology to languish in comparison to research on earlier "more
important" periods such as the biblical or the classical periods. In
our own case, it was only as we began to focus our research on a problem
which was equally applicable to all historical periods that we began to
take seriously the Ottoman centuries. This led quic
When it comes to the feminine critique of archaeology there is much to
be said for a food systems approach. Because of its concern with the complete
range of instrumental and symbolic activities carried out by people in their
quest for food, it automatically brings the contribution of women, and also
children, to the fore. It thus gets beyond the traditional masculine concerns
with fortifications and building remains, something which actually has been
crucial to our attempts in Jordan to operationalize research on the Ottoman
period. Indeed, from this period, it is more the work of women than the
work of men that has left residues for archaeologists to study.
I would like to conclude by explaining what I see as being the merits of
a Marxian world systems approach as compared with the food systems approach
which I have advocated here. In my view, the world systems approach is useful
as a means to understand the oscillations during historical times in the
operation of local food systems. It provides some of the answers to why
during certain periods we see a pumping up of the local food system and
during other periods we see a slacking off in the intensity of this system.
The approach does not provide an adequate framework for operationalizing
research on all historical periods, however. Furthermore, it is inadequate
as a tool for operationalizing research on pre-industrial agrarian society
in the Middle East because of its emphasis on unequal exchange in a hierarchy
of world markets. During some historical periods, and certainly during prehistoric
times, this assumption simply does not apply.
Finally, however, what I find most useful about the food systems approach
is that it really is not grounded in any particular deterministic dogma.
I view it rather as a heuristic, as a thinking aid for helping archaeologists
to think integratively about the wide range of materials they uncover in
their surveys and excavations. This is because, as noted earlier, the vast
majority of the finds we encounter as archaeologists--especially those of
us working in rural contexts--can be set in some sort of functional or symbolic
context using this perspective.
I believe that alone, the food systems perspective is insufficient for
explaining long-term cultural changes. While it is useful as a framework
for operationalizing research on rural regions and settlements regardless
of time period; and while it goes a long ways toward helping to make some
sort of integrative sense out of a wide range of artifacts and biofacts,
it has to be supplemented by other theoretical orientations in order to
provide adequate explanations for the cultural patterns it helps to uncover.
Such supplementary frameworks might include the role the capitalist world
system; or it might include the role of religion. For example, the archaeology
of Transjordan in the first millennium A.D. cannot be adequately understood
without reckoning with the influence of Christianity and Islam.
Thus, to conclude, no single framework is likely to provide all the answers
to the complex task of understanding the Ottoman world. My aim here has
merely been to remind us as scholars comfortably at work in our offices
that for the masses living in the shadow of empire, the quest for food was
more than a just brief interuption lasting a few minutes every day. For
the majority of these men, women and children, whose lives we are trying
to understand by our scholarly endeavors, it was what daily life was mostly
all about!
References Cited