Six seasons of wild pea harvest in Israel: bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication

Harvest experiments of wild crop relatives are essential for our understanding of the biology of wild plants embodied in the economy of ancient forager communities. Most of the previous experimental harvest reports spanned a single season and therefore are unable to address questions concerning long-term yield potential. Herein we report on six consecutive harvest seasons taking place at four sites in Israel that harbour wild pea populations: three typical Pisum fulvum sites and one typical Pisum elatius site. Three out of the four sites showed no indication of a decline in grain yield as a result of repeated harvest and the removal of a considerable portion of mature seeds. Site-specific factors seem to have a strong influence on the grain yield as no seasonal yield similarity was observed between adjacent and ecologically similar sites harbouring the same wild pea taxon. The erratic year-to-year wild pea yield we observed calls for a reassessment of the presumed role of grain legume species in Near Eastern hunter–gatherers' diet. Combined with published data on cultivation of wild pea, our results are inconsistent with models suggesting protracted domestication of Near Eastern grain legumes or with the preliminary attempts to apply Niche Construction Theory to the study of plant domestication in the Near East.     

Meir Har-Zion's act of reprisal: Reality and memory

On the night of March 5, 1955, Meir Har-Zion set out with three friends to avenge the murder of his sister and her boyfriend in the Judean Desert (in Jordanian territory), about two months earlier. They murdered five innocent Jordanian Bedouins and crossed back into Israel. Upon their return, they were placed under arrest and held until the end of March. This article examines the changes in Israeli perceptions of Har-Zion's reprisal act over the course of thirty years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, in order to shed light on the ways in which collective memory is molded in Israel as well as on the changes in Israeli society's attitude toward the issue of revenge and retaliation, from understanding and even admiration to condemnation and delegitimization.     

Planning with communities in regeneration projects: toward a gendered civic capacity

This article explores the central role that gender plays across a variety of scales in the development of civic capacity among residents of Meonot-Yam neighborhood in Bat-Yam, Israel. The article proposes a new, gendered reading of civic capacity which involves transforming women’s and men’s ways of thinking and acting out of the ordinary in this regeneration project, with the aim of updating and revising the term as related to planning with communities approaches. Using a performative understanding of gender based on feminist poststructuralist analysis to identity knowledge/power and place, we combine the analysis of community and personal scales, looking at ‘paradoxical moments’ to understand how the transformation in power relations has taken place and how civic capacity is developed. We do so by conducting a critical analysis of biweekly meeting minutes and in-depth interviews held over a three-year period (2010–2013). This civic capacity development is particularly important for women who manage to enhance and increase their social capital throughout those years.     

Palestine,Israel, Gaza,and the West Bank: the muddled mental maps of French and Israeli students

ABSTRACT

The Palestinian–Israeli Conflict is perceived by many – observers and parties to the conflict alike – as a struggle of two peoples over the same land. Yet, through this century-long conflict (and more so as Israel has expanded and deepened its occupation), what was once, perhaps, imagined as a single land has become an assortment of territories. These territories bear multiple names and different legal statuses, and their boundaries are often blurred. In light of the jumbled patchwork that Palestine–Israel has become, we examine the ways that the conflict’s territorial dimensions are imagined and represented. We study the mental maps of the region held by higher education students from Israel, both Jewish and Arab-Palestinian, as well as with university students from Montpellier, France. The representations indicate that while the French students were almost completely at a loss regarding the conflict’s spatial dimensions, the students from Israel were also confused, especially regarding the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We argue that these findings stem from a wider process of deterritorialization, linked to the conflicting relations between state and nation and intensified by a policy of chaotic spatial arrangements.     

Actually Existing Commons: Three Moments of Space of Community Gardens in New York City

Abstract: This paper analyzes an urban space that functions, it is argued, as the commons in the neoliberal city. The space of community gardens in New York City is “unpacked” according to three Lefebvrian moments of space: the material space, representations of space, and the lived space. Engaging alternative conceptualizations of social relations in the urban space, it complicates and explicates the notion of the commons and its actually existing manifestations.     

The Palestinian village of Ijzim during the 1948 war: Forming an anthropological history through villagers accounts and army documents

In the summer of 1948, following over six months of clashes, the Palestinian village of Ijzim was captured by Israeli troops and its inhabitants were uprooted and dispersed throughout the Middle East. Ijzim was one of roughly 400 Palestinian villages and towns that were depopulated during the 1948 war in Palestine. The combination of information gathered from Israeli army documents and the refugees' oral accounts, collected in Israel, Jordan and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, yields a complex picture of the local guerilla fighting and the social conditions that influenced the final consequences. Two main arguments are presented along the historical recounting of the events. The one sets the microcosmos of one village in contrast to the macro picture of the war. The other highlights the uniqueness and contribution of oral histories as sources that reveal facets otherwise missing. 1     

Experimental harvesting of wild peas in Israel: implications for the origins of Near East farming

Previous evaluations of the potential advantage of farming over foraging have been based on experimental harvesting of wild cereals in Near Eastern ecosystems. The highly successful combination of cereals and legumes, “the Near Eastern crops assemblage”, is considered a natural choice due to the complementary nutritional value of the two crop types. Yet, legumes were rarely referred to in models describing early farming and the transition from foraging to farming. Wild legumes differ from wild cereals in several attributes pertaining to domestication, including population density (patchy vs. dense), growth habit (indeterminate vs. determinate), dispersal units (camouflaged seeds vs. awned spikelets), seed dormancy (90–80% vs. 50%), and year to year establishment (erratic vs. regular). We have analyzed the yield potential of three wild pea species (Pisum elatius, P. humile, and P. fulvum) in several ecosystems in Israel. All three pea species have patchy distribution patterns and the yield potential of the wild populations is highly variable. A harvest rate of 0.6–610 grams (calculated per collector) of clean dry grain per hour of harvest time was estimated. Among the three species studied the one adopted for domestication appears to be the least productive. This suggests that the potential productivity of wild peas was not the only or even the major consideration for domestication.     

Wild lentil and chickpea harvest in Israel: bearing on the origins of Near Eastern farming

Several small seeded plants were domesticated as grain crops in the Near East and other domestication centers. In this study we investigate the potential of small seeded wild lentils, and chickpea as a food source for hunters-gatherers. The yield potential and the return in terms of grams of seeds per hour of collection time were evaluated in several wild populations in Israel. The yield figures never exceeded 50 g/h, and in most cases were below 20 g/h. These data reaffirm Ladizinsky's claim that wild lentils are unlikely to have been a staple resource for hunter-gatherers prior to plant domestication. The result presented herein may be significant vis-a-vis the role attributed to small seeded (‘inefficient’) plants in the Broad Spectrum hypothesis concerning late Paleolithic, pre-agricultural societies. It may also contribute to a more careful interpretation of plant remains recovered from pre-agricultural sites.     

Jephtah's Daughter: A History of Alternating Musical Endings

This work examines the relationship between the endings chosen for musical works based on the biblical story of Jephtah's daughter and broader currents of European thought. Because the biblical story leaves the fate of Jephtah's daughter unclear, commentators have offered two interpretations: Jephtah's daughter is either sacrificed or consecrated to God. The examination of these two interpretations in the various commentaries and artistic works throughout the ages suggest a possible correlation between a given artist's religious affiliation and the type of ending he composed for the story. Although Catholics would appear more likely to choose consecration as promoting the ideal of women's celibacy, no such correlation is seen in practice. Rather, the determining factor in the choice of the musical ending of the story is the dominant artistic convention of the time. This finding is in line with Curt Sachs's cultural theory of a universal pendulum of styles in Western civilization. Thus, the specific choice of the ending of the story of Jephtah's daughter in various artistic media may serve as a paradigm for broader trends of European thought.