Palestinian dune agriculture
Palestinian dune agriculture refers to traditional methods of cultivating the sandy dunefields of the southern Levant, particularly along the coastal plain of Palestine from Sinai to Yibna. These techniques, locally known as mawāṣī, transformed marginal sandy environments into productive gardens and orchards. Revived during the Late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, dune agriculture provided subsistence crops, fruit, and vegetables for surrounding villages, while also integrating into regional markets.
Historical background
Archaeological and geoarchaeological research has shown that the practice of interdune cultivation in Palestine originated during the Early Islamic period. Excavations near Caesarea revealed a distinctive plot-and-berm agroecosystem: farmers excavated shallow plots into the dunes and surrounded them with raised sand berms that acted as windbreaks and water-harvesting structures. These berms intercepted rainfall runoff and rising groundwater, while the depressed plots created a moist microenvironment that could support vines, vegetables, and fruit trees. In the Yavne dunefield, archaeologists documented a similar inter-settlement complex of intersecting berms and pits, suggesting that neighboring communities shared resources in cultivating interdune plots.The berms were often filled with refuse, ash, and architectural debris, deliberately enriching the sterile sands with organic material and creating anthropogenic soils. Botanical remains, including seeds and pollen, indicate cultivation of vegetables, cereals, and orchard crops adapted to the moisture regime of the plots. Optically stimulated luminescence dating and ceramic finds place the expansion of these systems in the 9th–10th centuries CE, corresponding with the late Abbasid and early Fatimid periods.
The plot-and-berm fields appear to have gone through phases of expansion and decline. Initial dune stabilization and intensive cultivation were followed by gradual abandonment, likely due to hydrological changes, climatic variability, or socio-political disruptions in the medieval period. Some areas were later reused during the Ottoman era under the name mawāṣī, representing a long tradition of dune-edge cultivation on Palestine’s coastal plain.
In Islamic law, dunefields were classified as mawāt and considered uncultivable, typically used for grazing by Bedouin tribes. Archaeological and textual evidence, however, show that specialized interdune farming existed from the Early Islamic period, notably near Ashkelon, Caesarea, and the Yavne-Yam dunefields.
By the 19th century, migration from Egypt and demographic growth in villages such as Isdud and Ḥamāma encouraged renewed exploitation of sandy soils. British Mandate cadastral records and aerial surveys document extensive planting of vines, figs, sycamores, olives, and vegetables in interdune depressions between the 1920s and 1940s.