Walker/Life on the Farm, 8. Market Gardening in Medieval Jerusalem

It is rare to find a rural site of the pre-modern period as well documented as Beit Mazmil. Although textually invisible until the 14th century, it leaves behind a rich historical record thereafter. In fact, one can trace Beit Mazmil’s history as an agriculturally productive village for 600 years: from the 14th through 19th centuries. These documents, moreover, tell us what crops were grown, how much the land was worth, and even the names of people who lived there through the centuries. It is beyond the scope of this work, which is primarily an archaeological report, to survey these texts in detail; this will be done in other publications. What this chapter offers, however, is an overview of the sources that describe the village, its residents, and its land, in a way that ties together the fieldwork at the site and in the terraces and helps to reconstruct possible factors behind peasant decision-making and practices that do not leave a material trace. In the process, we come to understand more the agrarian world in which the people of Beit Mamzil lived, and what their relationship was with the imperial states of the day.