Farming with Household Trash in Late Medieval Syria

Typical of the recycling spirit of medieval Islamic cultures, peasants reused metal objects and minerals obtained from a wide range of sources as fertilizers and pesticides. The fragments of broken pots were added to terraced fields to drain soils. Soil was enriched with diverse sources of animal manure and human waste, carefully selected and combined with a particular cropping in mind. This project explores the growing textual and archaeological evidence for soil enrichment, pesticides, and anti-fungal treatments as part of regular cultivation practices in Transjordan and Palestine in the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods. Ongoing fieldwork at three sites in modern Jordan and Israel, and their relic agricultural fields, are providing rich data about agricultural practice in diverse planting environments. A range of medieval and Ottoman Arabic textual sources have been consulted to reconstruct the value attached to these materials and their role in agricultural practices, providing a context for interpreting the archaeological record. The lecture will present the results of this work, combined with the emerging collaborative laboratory analysis of soils by project team members, to describe a world of recycling from a peasant’s perspective.

Bethany Walker (PhD 1998, University of Toronto) is Professor of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn. Before moving to Germany, she taught Middle Eastern history for 14 years as a university professor in the United States. A historically trained archaeologist and ceramicist, Walker directs multiple archaeological projects in Israel and Jordan. Her research sits at the intersection of environmental history and peasant studies and explores such topics as state-peasant relations, land tenure and use, and landscape transformation. As an affiliated scholar in Department AAK of the MPIWG, she is documenting the waste disposal and soil enrichment practices of medieval peasants in Syria as part of the Working Group “Metals, Minerals and the Life Cycle.” Walker serves on numerous editorial boards internationally and is a long-time board member of the American Center of Research in Amman. In 2023 Walker was awarded the P.E. MacAllister Field Archaeology Award for her career-long contributions to ancient Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean archaeology by the American Society of Overseas Research. Among her monographs are Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago 2011) and her edited Life on the Farm in Late Medieval Jerusalem: The Peasant Farmstead of Khirbet Beit Mazmil, Its Occupants and Their Industry over Five Centuries (Sheffield 2025).