Byzantine—Early Islamic resource management detected through micro-geoarchaeological investigations of trash mounds (Negev, Israel)

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Byzantine—Early Islamic resource management detected through microgeoarchaeological investigations of trash mounds (Negev, Israel) Don H. Butler ID1¤a*, Zachary C. Dunseth ID1,2¤b, Yotam Tepper3,4, Tali Erickson-Gini5, Guy Bar-Oz ID3*, Ruth Shahack-Gross1* a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 1 Laboratory for Sedimentary Archaeology, Department of Maritime Civilizations, Recanati Institute of Maritime Studies, Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, 2 Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, 3 Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, 4 Israel Antiquities Authority, Tel Aviv, Israel, 5 Archaeological Division, Israel Antiquities Authority, Omer, Israel ¤a Current address: Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, United States of America ¤b Current address: Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America * (DHB); (GBO); (RSG) OPEN ACCESS Citation: Butler DH, Dunseth ZC, Tepper Y, Erickson-Gini T, Bar-Oz G, Shahack-Gross R (2020) Byzantine—Early Islamic resource management detected through microgeoarchaeological investigations of trash mounds (Negev, Israel). PLoS ONE 15(10): e0239227. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239227 Editor: Mario Novak, Institute for Anthropological Research, CROATIA Received: April 27, 2020 Accepted: September 1, 2020 Published: October 14, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 Butler et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (grant number 648427 to GB-O) and the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 340-14 to GB-O). DHB was supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the University of Haifa Graduate Abstract Sustainable resource management is of central importance among agrarian societies in marginal drylands. In the Negev Desert, Israel, research on agropastoral resource management during Late Antiquity emphasizes intramural settlement contexts and landscape features. The importance of hinterland trash deposits as diachronic archives of resource use and disposal has been overlooked until recently. Without these data, assessments of community-scale responses to societal, economic, and environmental disruption and reconfiguration remain incomplete. In this study, micro-geoarchaeological investigations were conducted on trash mound features at the Byzantine—Early Islamic sites of Shivta, Elusa, and Nesanna to track spatiotemporal trends in the use and disposal of critical agropastoral resources. Refuse derived sediment deposits were characterized using stratigraphy, microremains (i.e., livestock dung spherulites, wood ash pseudomorphs, and plant phytoliths), and mineralogy by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Our investigations detected a turning point in the management of herbivore livestock dung, a vital resource in the Negev. We propose that the scarcity of raw dung proxies in the studied deposits relates to the use of this resource as fuel and agricultural fertilizer. Refuse deposits contained dung ash, indicating the widespread use of dung as a sustainable fuel. Sharply contrasting this, raw dung was dumped and incinerated outside the village of Nessana. We discuss how this local shift in dung management corresponds with a growing emphasis on sedentised herding spurred by newly pressed taxation and declining market-oriented agriculture. Our work is among the first to deal with the role of waste management and its significance to economic strategies and urban development during the late Roman Imperial Period and Late Antiquity. The findings contribute to highlighting top-down societal and economic pressures, rather than PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239227 October 14, 2020 1 / 22 PLOS ONE Studies Authority, the University of Haifa Department of Maritime Civilizations, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. ZCD was supported by the Dan David Scholarship: Archaeology and the Natural Sciences. Research was conducted under licenses from the Israel Antiquities Authority (Elusa: G-69/2014, G-10/2015, G-6/2017; Shivta: G-87/2015, G-4/2016; Nessana: G-4/2017). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Micro-geoarchaeology of trash mounds environmental degradation, as key factors involved in the ruralisation of the Negev agricultural heartland toward the close of Late Antiquity. Introduction Issues surrounding resource and waste management figure prominently within debates concerning the causes and consequences of societal and environmental transformations through time [1–7]. This topic, one central to opening the conceptual, empirical, and pragmatic scope of the Anthropocene, benefits from archaeological research into the factors shaping socio-ecological dynamics at multiple nested spatialities and tempos. Micro-geoarchaeological research in urban and hinterland settings contributes to clarifying aspects of these processes that are often imperceptible in records of material culture [8–10]. Studies of anthrosediments deposited and formed through trash disposal and management are specifically providing fresh insight into changing economic systems, (un)sustainable resource-use, human-plant-animal networks, niche construction, urban renewal/decay, and settlement strategies [10–16]. Trash disposal locations, however, are often distorted or erased at cities, towns, and villages that have witnessed uninterrupted occupation and renewal throughout the past and into the modern era. Signposts for economic fluorescence and erosion are difficult to follow through the dense palimpsests formed at long-lived communities, such as those growing throughout the Roman Imperial Period, Late Antiquity, and beyond [17, 18]. Without these data on refuse disposal and resource management, our assessments of how different societies and communities contribute and respond to disruptions in resource structures remain fragmentary. These assessments are needed to develop holistic strategies for recognizing early signs of resource management issues such as overproduction/consumption, ecological overshoot, and depreciated surplus in the past, present, and near future [6, 7]. This is particularly important in marginal and threatened environments suc (...truncated)