Introduction

At the onset of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire came to control most of the Mediterranean and its inland regions, pulling many parts of Europe and the Middle East into its rapidly expanding economic orbit. It was a middleman in the maritime and long-distance trade of luxury goods (spices, textiles, porcelain), and a transit zone between Asia and Europe. The Ottoman Empire had global reach and global claims (at least on Sunni Muslims); was a multifaith, multiethnic, and multilingual entity; and was dissolved as a political entity only with the conclusions of the First World War.

With a political system so long-lasting, territories so geographically extensive, and a population so culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse, it is impossible in a single study to cover the archaeology of the Ottoman Empire at its fullest extent. A rapidly growing body of scholarship has already provided state-of-the-art surveys of the field (Baram and Carroll 2000; Vorderstrasse 2014; Walker 2014; Walker, Insoll et al. 2020). What the following article offers, instead, is a deliberately local view on empire from the perspective of small-scale communities. It uses recent fieldwork in the Eastern Mediterranean to explore the issues that made the Ottoman state a presence in the lives of peasants, small-scale merchants, Bedouin, pilgrims, and local elites. The study, then, focuses on rural sites in southern Greater Syria (namely historical Palestine and the Transjordan—modern Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan),Footnote 1 with reference to contemporary developments in Egypt and Anatolia. The chronological scope is the early Ottoman era, from the conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate (1516 in Syria and 1517 in Egypt) through the 18th century, deliberately ending before the Ottoman reforms of the later 19th century. The political, military, economic, and administrative reforms initiated by the Ottoman state to modernize its operations and help it survive the challenges of an increasingly globalizing, economically competitive, and industrializing world, are collectively known as the “Tanzimat” (“reorganization,” in Turkish). This era was launched in Greater Syria with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which required official registration of land in the hands of a proprietor, who would then be responsible for paying taxes on it. This period (1839–1876) was a watershed in land tenure and use, markets, settlement and migration, and institutional and technological development, and, as such, represents a new period of imperial–local relations that could be more properly defined as “modern.” The archaeology of the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras, which reflect a growing interest in matters related to cultural heritage, is covered by other articles in this thematic collection; see also Palmer and Given (this issue) and Saidel (this issue).

Ottoman Archaeology as a Historical Pursuit

By some definitions, the archaeology of the Ottoman world is a form of historical archaeology: chronologically, the period largely covers the 16th century and beyond, postdating the “medieval Islamic” era, and, most importantly, it is text rich. The Ottoman state was heavily bureaucratized, generating a volume of paperwork and distributing copies of nearly every document to provincial and local administrators. Its religious scholars and literati wrote copiously. The “pax Ottomana” of the 16th and 17th centuries made it possible to travel the length and breadth of the Mediterranean-wide empire with greater ease and safety than had existed during the preceding centuries of Islamic rule. The imperial and many provincial archives, as well as the imperial and many private libraries, have remained intact until today. As a result, archaeologists of the Ottoman world have access to the same range of documentary and narrative sources as archaeologists of medieval Europe and the New World. These range from tax registers (tapu defters), endowment documents (vekfiyes), fixed-price registers (narh defters), yearbooks (salnamehs), chronicles, and garrison rolls to diplomatic documents and records of European consulates, monastic and church records and correspondence, travelers’ accounts, Venetian cadastral maps, land registers, and memoirs. To this should also be added archaeologically retrieved documents, such as inventories and bills of sale from merchants’ homes and customs houses (Hinds and Sakkout 1986; Hinds and Ménage 1991). The most important genres of textual sources for archaeological study of the Ottoman world are, by far, tax registers,Footnote 2 court registers (sijillāt), and fatwa manuals (of legal opinions). For some regions of the Ottoman Empire, such as the Jerusalem area and regions of the Balkans (Rumelia), complete series of court documents spanning centuries are extant, making possible the study of the long-term impact of fiscal and legal reforms, real-estate exchanges, and migration. The sijillāt, in particular, include registration of land sales that record in detail the location and size of cultivated fields, orchards, and gardens, their cropping, land prices, and names of buyers and sellers. In combination with archaeological and botanical analysis, it provides a unique opportunity to study the ways in which agricultural production in small-scale communities changed over time. Legal texts provide a window on the things that mattered most to local communities and point to the flashpoints of conflicts within them, such as access to water and land, corvée labor, and intracommunal violence.

Purely archaeological contributions to the study of the Ottoman Mediterranean have, until very recently, not kept pace with historical studies. The many and complex factors behind the marginalization of the study of the Ottoman period in archaeological circles, the poor preservation and visibility of Ottoman levels at archaeological sites, and a certain degree of hostility to this period of national history and imagination, in general, have been addressed in other publications (Baram and Carroll 2000; Vorderstrasse 2014; Walker 2014; Petersen 2017). Scholarship on Ottoman material culture was long the prerogative of art historians, whose contributions to the understanding of colonialism was, and continues to be, tied securely to the study of urban form (the “making of the Ottoman city”), urban housing, imperial architecture, and production of and trade in fine glazed wares.Footnote 3 These are imperial perspectives on settlement, production, and consumption. What was missing was the local view of the imperial state and the local experience of it. The “rural turn” in Ottoman archaeology, particularly on the pre-Tanzimat era, has been largely fueled by interest in peasant agency, migration and travel (Given 2017; Al-Shqour 2019), land use and landscape studies (Given 2000; Given and Hadjianastasis 2010; Walker 2022), markets and consumption (Baram and Carroll 2000; François 2005, 2012; Walker 2007, 2016; Walker, Gadot et al. 2020), the material culture of pastoral nomads (through the study of camps and cemeteries—on graves see Toombs [1985] and Eakins [1993]), vernacular architecture (McQuitty 2007), settlement form (Given 2000; Walker and Dolinka 2020), and the marked regionalism and longevity of material culture, ceramics in particular (Stern 2017; Walker 2017; Stern et al. 2019).Footnote 4 In recent years, salvage excavations in Israel have generated interest in the Ottoman era and have produced much new data on settlement distribution and ceramics.Footnote 5

Progress in understanding these areas of rural life would not be possible without the integration of textual sources and methods, which has become an integral part of Ottoman archaeology today. More archaeologists are using a wider range of texts than is usually the case in Islamic archaeology, and Ottoman historians are increasingly turning to the archaeological record to explore questions related to the structure of local society, consumption, daily life, and the impact of environmental and climatic change. There are more publications jointly authored by archaeologists and historians than ever before, particularly on regional surveys (Sutton 2000; Zarinebaf et al. 2005; Given and Hadjianastasis 2010). Taxation and legal documents, in particular, have provided critical source material for identifying the possible economic and political triggers behind changes in settlement, land use, and material culture at the household level. The role of empire in these developments, and the limits to imperial reach in daily life, are explored below.

Comparison of two contemporary villages in the highlands of southern Bilād al-Shām reveals ways in which the hand of the state impacted life in small-scale communities (Fig. 1). The archaeological sites of Khirbet Beit Mazmīl and Tall Ḥisbān, excavated under the author’s direction, are located in the central Palestinian highlands (the outskirts of Jerusalem) and the Madaba Plains of central Jordan, respectively.

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Map of sites mentioned in this article. (Photo courtesy of Michael Given.)

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Imperial Intrusions into Daily Life

Privatization of Land

The Ottoman era ushered in important changes in the way agricultural land was used and developed. The innovations of the time were largely financial and meant to bring more agricultural land and the revenues it produced under the direct control of the state. At the end of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1516 C.E.), when much of the Eastern Mediterranean was ruled from Cairo by an ethnically diverse dynasty of manumitted military slaves, most cultivable land in Egypt was tied up in endowments (awqāf) and untaxable; large parts of Syria were as well. To the ire of the religious establishment, in the 16th century the Ottomans instituted, for the first time, a tax of 10% on all endowed properties there, including farmland. The revenues of most land and villages in Palestine were then distributed to timariots, military officers who held the right to collect a wide range of taxes. The timar system transformed local society in many ways. While most peasants suffered under the weight of complex and burdensome taxes, a new rural elite also emerged that acquired wealth as the local tax collectors serving the timariots (who generally lived in the cities) or endowment managers, and later as tax farmers in their own right. This nouveau riche peasant class lived in houses that combined characteristics of contemporary urban styles with the local vernacular. Sixteenth-century court documents refer to them as akābir al-qaryah (village elites) or zuʿamāʿ al-qarya (village leaders) (Abd Allatif 2010). From their ranks emerged the sheikhs of the “throne villages,” a point to which I will return later.

The large-scale cultivation of cash crops (cotton, tobacco, olives for soap, wheat) empire-wide was made possible by a collusion of fiscal and legal developments. The trigger was the eventual decline of the (quasi-feudal) timar system, which financed the Ottomans’ military. In its wake, state land was gradually liquidated and privatized, tax collection passed into the hands of tax farmers, new forms of land leasing and exchange (ijār and istabdāl) emerged, and peasants gained access (though limited) to credit through loans from timariots and the “cash waqf” (Al-Sabagh 2014). Credit, unfortunately, quickly led to peasant debt: rural indebtedness was becoming a chronic problem from the 16th century, as the confirmation (tathbīt) of debt liability was frequently registered then in the Jerusalem courts (Walker 2011:185–186). The sale and leasing of state lands, the growing popularity of endowment-based mortgages, and more ready access to credit are important factors behind changes in land tenure over time. Each stage of development resulted in observable changes in, literally, the “lay of the land,” with the construction of terraces, planned soil enrichment, expansion of irrigation systems, and types of crops cultivated (Walker 2021b). These methods of intensification of agricultural production were primarily market-driven and the result of peasant initiative. How these changes impacted society on the village level can be followed through recent fieldwork in Jerusalem.

The archaeological site of Khirbet Beit Mazmīl is a 2.8 dunam (0.28 ha) walled farming complex in Jerusalem’s agricultural hinterland (Fig. 2).Footnote 6 It is the best-preserved medieval rural site in the immediate outskirts of Jerusalem and has been occupied, reused, and remodeled more or less continuously since the late Byzantine period, though its standing remains date mainly to the Mamluk and Ottoman eras. Khirbet (the “ruins of”) Beit Mazmīl (“the House of the Flute”) was the name given to the complex in the 19th and early 20th centuries by local people. The historical name of this small archaeological site is not known. It was likely a satellite settlement—an offshoot (“daughter”) village or seasonal farmstead—of the Arab village of Beit Mazmīl, located, until 1967, 1 km to the south of the site. Perched on the summit of one of the highest hills in the Jerusalem municipality, the site is equidistant between Jerusalem’s Old City and the village of Ein Karem. The ruins of a 14th- and 15th-century amiral estate (a Mamluk-era rural qaṣr) was reoccupied in the late 16th century by a peasant family that transformed it into a farmstead. At some point in the late 18th or early 19th century, and after a brief period of abandonment, it was reclaimed by another family of farmers and refashioned as a walled farmstead (an 'ezbah), occupied seasonally. When an earthquake in 1920 caused structural damage to parts of the drystone superstructure, the farmstead was finally abandoned, and the archaeological site repurposed, over time, as a terraced almond grove (Walker and Dolinka 2020).

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Entrance to Khirbet Beit Mazmīl. (Photo by author.)

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The changes in the form and function of this farmstead over the Ottoman centuries can be interpreted against the backdrop of the contemporary development of the farmland belonging to the nearby village of Beit Mazmīl. The proprietorship and use of these fields can be traced in some detail from the Jerusalem Sharīʿa court sijillāt, in a series of registers spanning the 16th to 18th centuries (Rabāyiʿah 2010–2018). At that time, land that legally belonged to a Muslim religious endowment (a waqf) became available through purchase and lease, and much of the land exchanged in this fashion was cultivated in orchards. Over the course of a century tax farming became commonplace, providing another method of land exchange. There are numerous examples in the sijillāt as well of mortgages secured by religious endowments and what appear to be cash waqfs (money endowments, a financial innovation of the 16th century). What followed was a bit of a real-estate “boom,” with orchards in the lands surrounding Beit Mazmīl, shares in orchards, and shares in the produce from these orchards (all different commodities) regularly changing hands.Footnote 7 The base of people participating in these exchanges expanded beyond the local clerics and village sheikhs—who had the financial means, political connections, and, apparently, enough market knowledge to buy and sell real estate—to include other villagers and their kin. By the 17th century, the village was surrounded by countless vineyards, olive groves, and orchards of figs, apples, and quince.The properties exchanged in this period tended to be small plots of land or shares in the same; many of the same people bought multiple, scattered plots, often in quick succession (Walker, Gadot et al. 2020). The subdivision of terraced fields into such smaller plots can be seen in the organization of field walls visible in Figure 3.

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Aerial view of the relict terraces and plot walls near Khirbet Beit Mazmīl. Area represents 0.8 ha. (Photo courtesy of Omer Zeʿevi-Berger.)

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The botanical record suggests important changes in cultivation strategy from the Mamluk to Ottoman periods. A combined reading of the macrobotanical, phytolith, and faunal remains from the site suggests that agricultural production became increasingly diversified over time, with a balance of cereal- and orchard-based cultivation.Footnote 8 From the 16th century the choice of specific crops, however, seems to have been driven largely by market opportunities. Emmer (soft or “bread”) wheat was not cultivated or consumed. Instead, durum (hard) wheat and hulled barley were. Durum wheat––often consumed in the form of porridges––was best suited for long-distance transport, and hulled barley for long-term storage and local consumption. This kind of cereal cultivation was a regional pattern, which has been carefully reconstructed at Tall Ḥisbān, discussed in the following section. As for the non-cereal component of the diet, the household at Khirbet Beit Mazmīl had access to a surprising variety of fruits and vegetables, including lentils, bitter vetch, the common pea, olives, grapes, and figs. Meat preferences seem to have changed as well: chicken came to occupy a more important part of the diet in the 16th–18th centuries than mutton, though consumption of sheep and goat did not disappear. The gradual shift to a chicken-based diet may be related to the influence of urban kitchen culture in the 16th century, demonstrating closer social and economic ties to Jerusalem (Walker 2022). While a range of factors would have come into play in the decision to cultivate crops and raise animals in this manner, the incorporation of the farmstead into urban markets, as well as an improved travel infrastructure, were clearly among them; see Vroom (this issue) for further discussion of Ottoman-period foodways.

In an effort to document changes in landscape and explore the relationship between changes in field use and site function, study of relict agricultural terraces in the vicinity of Khirbet Beit Mazmīl began in 2017 (Fig. 3). The study area was defined by the texts themselves: land that was associated with a Mamluk-era endowment and the location of fields described in the Ottoman sijills as belonging to the village of Beit Mazmīl. Soils from the terrace remains were dated by optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a laboratory technique that dates the last time the quartz in the soils was exposed to light. Fieldwork by Tel Aviv University prior to the current project suggested that the most active period of terrace construction in the highlands west of Jerusalem was in the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods, and that development of farmland through terracing was a phenomenon of the last 800 years (Gadot et al. 2016). Fieldwork in the immediate vicinity of Khirbet Beit Mazmīl since 2017 has documented a further development: fields terraced in this period were subsequently partitioned into smaller plots by field walls between the 17th and 19th centuries (Walker, Gadot et al. 2020). This history of terrace building complements the process suggested by the court registers and the botanical record: an investment in terraced orchards in ever smaller plots, owned by individual peasants or as shares in the same. The development of agricultural land through extensive terrace building appears to have been a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon of this period, as the growing use of OSL dating is demonstrating (Turner et al. 2021).

A more detailed picture of the mechanics of ground preparation, planting, and harvesting can be found in the medieval Arabic agrarian treatises (filāḥa manuals) that circulated in Iraq and Spain from the 10th century, and then in Egypt, Yemen, and Syria. They gained in popularity with the ruling and urban elites in the late Mamluk and especially in the Ottoman periods, when many were copied and sent to imperial libraries (Shopov 2016, 2020). The earliest Arabic manuals were compendiums of knowledge: encyclopedic translations of works from Greek and Persian. By the 15th century, however, new manuals began to appear in Syria, penned by clerics-turned-farmers who came to control the revenues of agricultural land as managers of rural endowments. The authors of some of these manuals note that they have acquired their knowledge about land, crops, soils, and watering conditions by watching farmers in the fields (Shopov 2016). This literature—in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—flourished across the Mediterranean from the 16th century, with political and scholarly elites actively exchanging manuscripts and sending their book merchants to distant lands to acquire texts for their libraries. While the debates over who exactly read these manuals continue, it is likely their growing popularity was in some way connected with the greater availability of land and agricultural entrepreneurship.Footnote 9 Privatization of land, rapid commercialization of agriculture, and terrace building were important factors behind economic growth in rural regions of not only Syria, but the Ottoman Empire as a whole.

Commercialization of Agriculture

Changes in land tenure progressed in tandem with changes in land use, namely the spread of urban gardening, rural garden agriculture for urban markets, and export cereal production. These cultivation practices can be found across the Eastern Mediterranean from the late Mamluk period, becoming the norm in small-scale cultivation from the 16th century. Urban gardening—with garden plots squeezed in between apartment buildings, in courtyards, and in “green belts” surrounding the city—became a popular subsistence strategy in Cairo and Istanbul (Quickel 2015; Shopov 2016). The cultivation of suburban orchards and vineyards and the aggressive buying and selling of rural gardens documented in detail by court records in Damascus and Jerusalem suggest a market orientation (Eychenne et al. 2018; Walker 2022). The landscape of cereal cultivation changed as more small fields, interspersed with orchards, could be found, planted in a variety of wheats and barleys and sold in the nearby urban markets.

The extensive grain fields of the highland plateaus of the Transjordan became a focus of this market-oriented cereal cultivation. Tall Ḥisbān is an 8 ha multiperiod site in the Madaba Plains of central Jordan (Fig. 4).Footnote 10 This plateau was the granary of empires for centuries and remains today a center of cereal production. A modest, Mamluk-period citadel occupies the summit of the tell, which is surrounded at its base by a densely settled village, composed of clusters of one-room farmhouses with shared courtyards and cisterns. Its medieval sūq (market) served a large area of the Transjordan central highlands, commanding 300 other villages on the Madaba Plains (Walker 2011:71, n146) and serving as an important regional market entrepôt. An earthquake decades later was the apparent catalyst for the transfer of the garrison to Amman in the late 14th century, eventually along with the marketplace, legal court, and part of the local population. The village shrank in size, and the tell was very slowly abandoned for fulltime occupation by the end of the 16th century, with the population dispersing to smaller settlements across the Madaba Plains. Although the series of Ottoman tax registers for the region comes to an end at this time, there is archaeological evidence that the fields in the immediate vicinity of Ḥisbān continued to be cultivated in cereals. Large quantities of grain were stored in the quṣūr (shunah complexes) of the Wadi Ḥisbān in the 18th and 19th centuries, described below (Prag 1991) (Fig. 5). With the “grain boom” of the mid-19th century, many villages in the Transjordan began to cultivate cereals for transport to Palestinian ports and export to the West (Walker 2007). In the Tanzimat era, the cereal fields of the Madaba Plains were revived, frequently by Palestinian absentee landowners who purchased and registered land; the “Nabulsi qaṣr” located a kilometer south of Tall Ḥisbān is a stark architectural reminder of those days (Carroll 2011). At each of these stages, either local farmers or foreign entrepreneurs seized market opportunities and intensified cereal production in the village.

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Tall Hisbān and the wheat fields of the Madaba Plains. (Photo courtesy of David Sherwin.)

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Fig. 5
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Shunats Saqr (lower front) and Diyāb (upper left) in the Wadi Ḥisbān, 1875. Shunat Diyāb was built ca. 1777 by the Adwan tribe. (Photo courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund and the American Palestine Exploration Society 76/77 and PEF/P 1698/1699.)

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In the highlands of the Transjordan and Palestine new kinds of settlement developed, as more local elites and small-scale landowners came to participate actively in market agriculture in cereals and orchard products. Architectural forms developed as well, adapting vernacular traditions for new use. The generic term of quṣūr was used locally in both regions for walled agricultural estates that combined family housing with extensive storage facilities, stables, cisterns, and facilities for processing of fruit byproducts (presses for olive oil and date molasses) and hand mills (for grinding wheat into flour). These family compounds were built of stone, roofed with vaults (cross vaults in Palestine, with greater use of barrel vaults in the Transjordan), and centered on an open courtyard used for a variety of family activities and food preparation (cooking, some threshing) and livestock. They were usually placed on hilltops and located near major roads for transport of agricultural products to markets. The term is known from the 14th century, when Mamluk feudal estates were built, at state expense, on the hills surrounding Jerusalem (Al-ʿUlaymī 1999). Over the course of the Ottoman era, they came to be associated with ever-larger family farms that sold their produce in Jerusalem. By the Tanzimat era, the term came to include suburban country estates, where the Jerusalem elite had summer homes (Kark and Oren-Nordheim 2001).

Quṣūr of drystone construction (also called 'ezbahs or seerah in Palestinian Arabic dialect) once covered the Palestinian highlands and were built in terraced vineyards and orchards (Fig. 2).Footnote 11 They developed out of the simple drystone watchtowers (manāṭīr, singular: manṭarah) that have punctuated the highland landscapes of Palestine since antiquity; residential spaces were added to the towers over time, and the structures became more complex in layout and design (Amiry and Riḥāl 2003; Ghadban 2012; Al-Houdalieh and Ghadban 2013). These family complexes were occupied only seasonally; Western travelers, who often saw them at times outside the harvest season, believed they were abandoned ruins (khirbahs). Over time some of these khirbahs grew into fully developed villages, occupied on a year-round basis; in the 19th century “khirbah” came to form part of the place name of many Palestinian villages as a result (Walker 2021a). Because mortar is not used and they are largely built of fieldstones, these kinds of quṣūr do not weather winter rains very well and rarely survive more than 200 years. Mother Nature, political conflicts, and urban development together have had a hand in erasing them from the landscape. Along with the terraces with which they formed an agricultural system, they are among the most rapidly disappearing components of Palestinian cultural heritage.

The gradual collapse of the timar system from the 17th century had much to do with both the active exchange of farmland of the period and the active participation of rural peoples in market agriculture. It also created a political vacuum that was quickly filled by local tribal elites in the Palestinian highlands, in what is today Lebanon, and in many parts of the Transjordan. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Ottoman government delegated to local sheikhs and chieftains in Palestine, many of whom were tax farmers, the kinds of responsibilities usually associated with governors: collecting taxes, safeguarding trade routes, adjudicating disputes, and mobilizing peasants for the Ottoman state in times of a military conflict. Their seat of power, and the symbol of tribal autonomy in this period, was the “throne village” (qara al-karāsī). There are over 40 throne villages still standing in the Palestinian highlands today. The hilltop, rural mansions are a combination of urban and traditional stone architecture and resemble an urbanized form of the 'ezbahs (Amiry 2003). The throne village, as a form of settlement and a system of governance, came to an end in the 1830s–1840s with the invasion of Palestine by the Egyptian Ibrahim Pasha (Abdulfattah 2007).

Consumption, Commodities, and Markets

From the Mamluk era, the rural communities of southern Syria (Bilād al-Shām) made use of a wide variety of markets (sūqs), large and small, through which they exchanged with other villages, Bedouin populations, and larger towns, and came to acquire goods from farther afield. These included year-round, weekly village markets (aswāq shaʿiba), seasonal markets (aswāq mawsimiyya) open during pilgrimage season, and urban markets operating on a daily basis (Walker 2011:38–40; Al-Shqour 2019). Many villages came to specialize in particular crops that were sold in regional markets (Walker 2007). With such localized specialization, people relied on the village markets to gain access to a wider variety of produce, meat, and animal byproducts, as well as new consumer goods now accessible through the long-distance exchange networks fostered by the Ottoman state, such as luxury textiles and rugs (in cotton and silk), necklaces of semiprecious stones (Indian Ocean trade items [Boulogne and Henderson 2009]), porcelain and stonewares (from the Far East and Europe [François 2012]), glazed pottery of all varieties (from all regions of the Mediterranean [Amouric et al. 2000]), coffee and coffee cups, and tobacco and tobacco pipes. With the Ottoman annexation of Syria, village production appears to have been more market oriented, and a new tax (the bāj bazār) was levied on the urban sūqs. There cereals were bought and sold by professional grain brokers who also did business at the threshing floors, converting grains to cash (Wollina 2012:221; Walker, Laparidou et al. 2017:181–182). The village markets were taxed by the Ottomans at a lower rate, the revenues assigned to the provincial governor. Among the largest markets in the 16th-century Transjordan were those of the villages of Ḥubrāṣ and Irbid (in the north) and Salṭ (central plains), the castle towns of Ajlun and Kerak, and the customs house and port at Aqaba (Walker 2011:60).

Such an extensive network and diversity of rural markets necessitated a form of exchange that went beyond basic barter. The rural economy relied on both barter (that leaves neither a textual nor, arguably, an archaeological trace) and coinage. Gold (dinars) and silver (dirhams) coins were used for paying taxes (though some agricultural commodities, such as grains, were paid in kind), paying soldiers’ wages, and buying land. What drove the rural economy, however, was the humble copper coin—the currency of daily exchange in the local marketplace. Copper coins—the small-change of the household—dominate the numismatic assemblages at most archaeological sites. The 16th-century levels at Khirbet Beit Mazmīl have yielded dozens of piles of mangīrs, the heavy copper coins in widest circulation in Jerusalem at the time (Walker and Dolinka 2020). These were tucked away in corners of rooms and appear to have been carried around in small cloth bags. So many copper coins at village sites bears witness to active financial exchange in local markets and monetarization of the local economy.

One particularly powerful measure of the relationship between local and imperial markets, intraregional and international trade, and the ways that the imperial economy transformed local patterns of consumption has come from the study of tobacco and tobacco pipes (chibouks) (Fig. 6). Pipes and coffee cups are the most readily recognizable forms of Ottoman material culture at the local level (François 2005). Tobacco smoking penetrated all classes of Ottoman society; was the main form of communal consumption in towns, villages, and among the Bedouin; and was enjoyed by men and women alike. Tobacco smoking, the use of chibouks, the drinking of coffee, and the penetration of the finjan (a small handle-less coffee cup) into most households are consumption patterns that resulted from the entanglement of the Ottoman Empire with global markets (Baram 1999). Because of the short lifespan (and high breakage) of the pipe bowls (which fractured with regular pounding of the bowl during cleaning), their mass production at hundreds of sites across the Mediterranean and central Europe, and their rapidly changing forms and surface decoration, chibouk bowls are often found at late historical archaeological sites throughout the Mediterranean and provide invaluable chronological anchors.

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Chibouks from Aqaba Castle, Jordan. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Reem al-Shqour, excavation director.)

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The spread of tobacco use and cultivation was a direct outgrowth of the European “discovery of the New World” and the conquest of the Mediterranean coasts by the Ottomans in the 16th century. Tobacco was introduced into the Middle East through the port sites of Africa or Europe or both (Baram 1996:144) sometime between 1599 and 1606, and spread rapidly to the interior (Simpson 1998). When exactly tobacco was used in Palestine and how early it was cultivated locally remains a topic of debate. Tobacco was smoked in public spaces there as early as the opening decades of the 17th century, and travelers’ accounts of the period claim that it was a well-established pastime from at least 1599 (Dallam 1893:49, n1). The earliest tobacco smoked in Palestine was a Lebanese product (Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute––MAS 2016); it was only later cultivated locally from at least the late 17th century and perhaps earlier (Simpson 2000:171). In Palestine, as throughout the Ottoman domains, smokers chose between locally grown and imported tobaccos: both were available in the local markets, as were locally (or regionally) produced and imported pipes.Footnote 12 Generally associated with middens and fills and as surface finds on surveys, most pipe bowls in published reports date from the 17th to the 19th centuries (De Vincenz 2016, 2021); see Shapiro (2022) for a series of pipes spanning the early 17th through the early 20th centuries. Physical evidence of tobacco smoking from the 16th century is very rare.

One fortunate exception may be the small, light gray chibouk bowls from Khirbet Beit Mazmīl. The excavations have produced dozens of the bowls from stratified contexts (under architectural collapse and on floors in living and cooking spaces) and in association with very early Ottoman handmade pottery, late 16th-century mangīrs (ranging in date from the 1590s to 1617), and charcoal dated by 14C analysis to the turn of the 17th century. These are among the earliest tobacco-pipe fragments found to date in Palestine. As some of the pipes still contained the tobacco smoked in them, they were subjected to residue and isotope analysis to determine where the tobacco was cultivated. The laboratory analysis is now complete, and the multidisciplinary analysis of the tobacco, the pipes, the stratigraphic contexts, and texts related to the tobacco trade and taxation is being prepared for publication. In terms of social history, the association of these pipes with both men’s and women’s activity areas provides vivid evidence for the consumption of tobacco by women in domestic contexts from the beginning of tobacco cultivation in Palestine.

Beyond the Reach of the State

Sustainable Land Use

One readily acknowledges the “hand of the state” behind changes in land tenure and use in the 16th to 18th centuries. Pressures from imperial tax collectors, however, were not the only force driving peasant cultivation strategies. Local decision making can be identified in the cropping of cereals at Tall Ḥisbān and Khirbet Beit Mazmīl, where cereal diversification and intensification were local practices adopted to both survive droughts and turn profits for the peasant household. Mixed cereal cultivation, as a form of crop diversification, has been adopted historically, as today, as a risk management strategy. The seeds of different cereals are frequently sown together, and, in many countries in the Middle East today, a variety of different wheats and barleys are grown simultaneously in different fields. The ratio between hulled barley and naked wheat has been recently cited as one way to differentiate between subsistence and market-oriented production (Marston 2011). Barley, for example, is a drought-resistant, “hearty” cereal; its hulled variety is best suited for long-time storage because of its resistance to spoiling. Durum (“hard” or “naked”) wheat is free threshing; by losing its loose-fitting husk during threshing it is of lighter weight (and less expensive) for long-distance transport, making it well suited for export to distant markets (Heinrich 2017). A village that cultivated more durum wheat than hulled barley, according to this argument, produced primarily for the market. Likewise, although agricultural intensification could be a response to different pressures, it is usually associated with market production. Archaeobotanical evidence of intensification in the cereal sector includes irrigation of high-value cereals identified through the irrigation signals of wheat phytoliths (Laparidou and Rosen 2015). It should be emphasized, however, that the decision to cultivate particular cereals depended on more than market choices and strategies for household sustainability. Culinary choice was also an important factor. Both wheats and barleys were used in making household breads and pastries, and the two cereals were often (illegally) mixed in bread sold in the markets (Ibn Kannān 1992; Walker, Laparidou et al. 2017:244–245).Footnote 13

Regionalisms and Continuity in Material Culture—the Ceramic Record

Many other aspects of daily life in rural settings remained untouched by imperial programs and institutions. Local industries, such as ceramic production and vernacular architecture, were self-reliant and resilient, making use of local knowledge and resources and surviving the vagaries of political and economic shifts of the early modern era (McQuitty 2007; Walker 2017). The decentralization of ceramic production in the middle Islamic period (12th–15th centuries)Footnote 14 resulted in a marked regionalism, impacting not only the development of glazed wares, but also handmade wares, until modern times. Handmade geometrically painted ware, usually referred to by its acronym “HMGP” in the archaeological literature, is a readily recognizable ceramic marker of middle (12th–early 16th centuries) and late (16th–19th centuries) Islamic Syria, though its origins are much earlier (Fig. 7). It changes very little in assemblage, fabric, form, and surface decoration from the 11th through the mid-20th centuries (Johns 1994; Walker 2009). While produced throughout rural areas of southern Syria, there is growing archaeological evidence that the ware first emerged in a semipastoral environment in the southern Transjordan and spread from there to other regions (Walmsley and Grey 2001; Makowski 2020). Over time, two different modes of production developed: one in the household (for the family unit, by the family unit) and one as a workshop industry by specialized potters working, in fact, with a slow wheel (Gabrieli et al. 2014). Its development had nothing to do with imperial interventions. The distribution of HMGP owes everything to the structure of local markets and the traditional mobility of rural peoples.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Handmade geometrically painted ware (HMGP) jar from the Mamluk Citadel storeroom at Tall Ḥisbān. (Image courtesy of the Andrews University project archives, 1999.)

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Gaza ware is perhaps the best example of a long-lived wheel-made ceramic industry and is one of the hallmark wares of Ottoman Palestine (Israel 2006; Abu Khalaf 2009; Salem 2009); see also Saidel (this issue). It is readily identifiable by its range of forms and gray hue, the color produced in an oxygen-reduction kiln. Although there is still no consensus on when it was first produced, there is archaeological evidence for its appearance as early as the 16th century (Rosen and Goodfriend 1993; Walker and Dolinka 2020), reaching its fullest development in the late 19th century. Usually associated with the kilns of the town of Gaza, this ware was produced, in fact, in family-run workshops across southern Palestine; see Israel and Saidel (2021) for kilns recently discovered at Faluja. The potters produced a wide range of forms, but it was the large storage jars and ibriqs (spouted water jars) that were the most popular with largely rural customers throughout Palestine, the Transjordan, and Lebanon, particularly by the late 19th century (Fig. 8). They were used at home (to store a variety of foodstuffs) and in the fields (for drinking water during farm work). The jars were quite heavy and were transported by land via donkeys and camels. Small village markets throughout southern Syria carried these wares, which were used in village households. The spread of Gaza ware throughout the region was also due to the migration of potters from southern Palestine, who took their family trades with them (Salem 2009). The ware came to be imitated by local potters, as recently demonstrated by petrographic analysis of pottery from northern Jordan (Walker 2020). Like HMGP, Gaza ware (and its derivatives) has a long history of production in the region, the distribution and consumption of which has more to do with long-established rural networks than the presence of the Ottoman state. While migration and trade certainly benefited from imperially led improvements in infrastructure, these distinctly local ceramic traditions were indigenous crafts that developed independently.

Fig. 8
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Gaza ware bornyia (milk jar), from Reuveni’s Nursery and Garden, Emek Refai’m Street, Jerusalem. (Image courtesy Benjamin Saidel; previously published in Israel [2006:235, figure 250].)

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Conclusions

The Ottoman Empire was a bridge between the Western and Eastern worlds from the 16th century. The imperial focus on protecting trade and pilgrimage (and the short-term investment in infrastructure that supported it), territorial expansion, and economic growth certainly impacted international trade, patterns of consumption, knowledge transfer, and, as this article has emphasized, developments in agriculture. However, it did not alter many aspects of daily life, particularly in rural societies. Traditional crafts and agriculture and social and small-scale market networks were not impacted in any direct way by the imperial state.

Imperial reach did not extend far into the daily lives of rural communities in the Arab world except in the realm of tax collection and land tenure. The collapse of the old timariot system had the unexpected result of making land available—through many means (outright sale, leasing, tax farming, exchange)—to a wider spectrum of people than ever before. The subsequent commercialization of orchard agriculture, in particular, may have been the single most important way that village communities in the eastern Mediterranean were transformed by policies made in Istanbul. However, even in this case, one cannot consider this an Ottoman endeavor; it is a stark example of peasant agency, taking advantage of economic opportunities and sharing knowledge about market conditions.

One lesson to be learned from the case of Palestine and the Transjordan is that many of the changes in land use and tenure resulting from policies made in Istanbul had repercussions in the lands it controlled throughout the Mediterranean. Terrace building, land-enrichment practices, the growth of urban gardening and market agriculture, the growing business of agro-real estate, and high peasant mobility are characteristics, in fact, of many regions of the Mediterranean world in this period, though the factors behind them may have differed from place to place. The catalysts behind what appear to have been parallel developments throughout the Mediterranean basin, and its hinterlands, is yet unknown. Future research on the imperial impact on local society in this period should focus on the agrarian regimes in a regionally comparative manner.