Feeding the Troops?: Patterns of Agricultural Production in the Macrobotanical Remains of Nabatean-Late Roman sites in the Wadi ath-Thamad, Jordan

Summary

The macrobotanical record from Khirbat ez-Zona, a Late Roman castellum, reveals a pattern of crop refuse that does not fit the grand narrative of Roman agricultural practice or previous studies of contemporaneous military structures in the region. The Eastern Mediterranean witnessed a considerable boom in both population and agricultural productivity during the Late Roman period. This productivity can reflect the practices of an empire from religious ritual and pilgrimage, to preparation for important visits and festivals and lastly, feeding armies. In a recent macrobotanical study on a similar landscape in the Wadi Araba within the hinterlands of Petra, Ramsay and Smith argue for a largely local origin for agricultural production. Khirbat az-Zona is also in the hinterlands of an important urban center for the empire, Madaba. This study, which ultimately used 40 samples, attempted to address if this trend toward local production is also found in places such as Wadi ath-Thamad, where ecological conditions provided the basis for earlier periods of high agricultural productivity, in contrast to the Wadi Araba. In an effort to isolate the effect of Roman presence on agricultural productivity, samples from Nabataean domestic sites in the region were also sampled.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage