12 research outputs found
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The rise and fall of viticulture in the Late Antique Negev Highlands reconstructed from archaeobotanical and ceramic data.
The international scope of the Mediterranean wine trade in Late Antiquity raises important questions concerning sustainability in an ancient international economy and offers a valuable historical precedent to modern globalization. Such questions involve the role of intercontinental commerce in maintaining sustainable production within important supply regions and the vulnerability of peripheral regions believed to have been especially sensitive to environmental and political disturbances. We provide archaeobotanical evidence from trash mounds at three sites in the central Negev Desert, Israel, unraveling the rise and fall of viticulture over the second to eighth centuries of the common era (CE). Using quantitative ceramic data obtained in the same archaeological contexts, we further investigate connections between Negev viticulture and circum-Mediterranean trade. Our findings demonstrate interrelated growth in viticulture and involvement in Mediterranean trade reaching what appears to be a commercial scale in the fourth to mid-sixth centuries. Following a mid-sixth century peak, decline of this system is evident in the mid- to late sixth century, nearly a century before the Islamic conquest. These findings closely correspond with other archaeological evidence for social, economic, and urban growth in the fourth century and decline centered on the mid-sixth century. Contracting markets were a likely proximate cause for the decline; possible triggers include climate change, plague, and wider sociopolitical developments. In long-term historical perspective, the unprecedented commercial florescence of the Late Antique Negev appears to have been unsustainable, reverting to an age-old pattern of smaller-scale settlement and survival-subsistence strategies within a time frame of about two centuries
Language exposure practices among Hasidic Yiddish-Hebrew speaking children – in support of Yiddish vitality in Israel
Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic communities in Israel maintain the use of Yiddish as a prestigious language, connecting generations and preserving the communities’ traditional way of living (Hary and BenorBerlin, 2019)). Yiddish, the Community Language (CL), is supported within the family and the Hasidic community outside the family, while Hebrew, the Majority Language (ML), is used with members outside the community. Hasidic communities present a unique model of bilingualism to be discussed within the framework of the Ethno-linguistic Vitality Theory (Giles et al., 1977). The current study presents language exposure practices among bilingual Yiddish-Hebrew-speaking children in Israel and aims to reveal its possible influence on both language abilities and the communities’ vitality.Thirty-five parents and children (aged 37 months–80 months) participated in the study. Parents filled out the Bilingual Parents' Questionnaire (BIPAQ) (Abutbul-Oz and Armon-Lotem, 2022) addressing the children’s language-exposure practices as well as linguistic abilities and children's ML-Hebrew abilities were assessed with the Goralnik (2009) standardized test. Results indicated higher exposure to Yiddish when significant differences between daily hours of exposure for each language, number of months in an educational setting of CL-Yiddish and ML-Hebrew as well as the richness of the languages the children are exposed to. Furthermore, interpersonal exchanges conducted in CL-Yiddish outside the family supported Yiddish and influenced ML-Hebrew abilities; more usage of Yiddish with grandparents, teachers and peers was related to lower results of ML-Hebrew assessment whereas Yiddish use with younger siblings was related to higher evaluation of Yiddish abilities. Support of CL-Yiddish usage combined with its prestigious status and demographic characteristics of the Hasidic communities suggests a high vitality of the Yiddish-speaking community in Israel and its success in maintaining its language despite the dominance of the majority language (Hebrew)
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Unprecedented yet gradual nature of first millennium CE intercontinental crop plant dispersal revealed in ancient Negev desert refuse.
Peer reviewed: TrueGlobal agro-biodiversity has resulted from processes of plant migration and agricultural adoption. Although critically affecting current diversity, crop diffusion from Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages is poorly researched, overshadowed by studies on that of prehistoric periods. A new archaeobotanical dataset from three Negev Highland desert sites demonstrates the first millennium CE's significance for long-term agricultural change in Southwest Asia. This enables evaluation of the 'Islamic Green Revolution (IGR)' thesis compared to 'Roman Agricultural Diffusion (RAD)', and both versus crop diffusion during and since the Neolithic. Among the findings, some of the earliest aubergine (Solanum melongena) seeds in the Levant represent the proposed IGR. Several other identified economic plants, including two unprecedented in Levantine archaeobotany-jujube (Ziziphus jujuba/mauritiana) and white lupine (Lupinus albus)-implicate RAD as the greater force for crop migrations. Altogether the evidence supports a gradualist model for Holocene-wide crop diffusion, within which the first millennium CE contributed more to global agricultural diversity than any earlier period.As part of a Ph.D. dissertation conducted at Bar-Ilan University, this research was supported by the Bar-Ilan Doctoral Fellowships of Excellence Program, the Rottenstreich Fellowship of the Israel Council for Higher Education, and the Molcho fund for agricultural research in the Negev (awarded to D.F.). As part of the NEGEVBYZ project, this research was also supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant 648427) and the Israel Science Foundation (grant 340-14) (awarded to G.B.O). Manuscript preparation was further supported by a Newton International Fellowship of the British Academy (NIF23/100633) and a Marie S. Curie International Fellowship of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (Project CroProLITE, no. 101025677), awarded to D.F
Proliferating Cell Nuclear Antigen Is a Novel Inhibitory Ligand for the Natural Cytotoxicity Receptor NKp44
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Ancient trash mounds unravel urban collapse a century before the end of Byzantine hegemony in the southern Levant.
The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire