Roy Marom
“Read it not as a dead record of a former world or of an extinct race,” Claude R. Conder implored the readers of Tent Work in Palestine (1878), his narrative of the Survey of Western Palestine undertaken in the 1870s, “but as a living picture of manners and of a land, which can still be studied by any who will devote themselves to the task.” (vol. 1, xxi).
This passage is as true today as it was a century and a half ago. Palestinians belong to a living society whose collective memory and local traditions are anything but “a dead record of a former world or an extinct race.” Though experiencing uprooting and dispossessions, Palestinian community elders (and their Jewish neighbours) still carry with them precious knowledge of the lives, names and stories behind the silent ruins dotting the Palestinian countryside.
In 2014, I initiated the Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP) an ethnographic fieldwork and oral history preservation initiative with the aim of mitigating the inevitable loss of scientifically and culturally important information concerning the Palestinian countryside. So far, I have conducted over 1,500 oral history interviews concerning 850 Palestinian communities, or about 70% of inhabited sites in Mandatory Palestine. Through the PRHP, I specialized in the interdisciplinary, and often collaborative, exploration of rural Palestine at the intersection of socio-cultural history, geography, archaeology and ethnography from the Mamluk period until 1948. I have published studies about Late Islamic Lajjun/Megiddo, Hamama/Ashkelon, Isdud/Ashdod, Yibna/Yavne, Mulabbis/Petah Tikva and Sheikh Muwannis/Ramat Aviv, with over a dozen publications about other sites forthcoming.
In 2023, Prof. Bethany Walker, Professor of Islamic Archaeology at the Department of Islamic Studies, University of Bonn, requested my help in investigating the Late Islamic site of Bayt Lay (Heb. Beit Loya) in Israel’s Shephelah. This study, entitled “Tracing the People and Lifeways of Ottoman Khirbet Beit Loya,” was conducted with the PEF’s kind support in covering travel and communications expenditures. However, the past is not immune from the tribulations of the present. My work was hampered by my positionality as a Jewish Israeli scholar studying rural Palestinian history and heritage, in a time of unprecedented ethnoreligious conflict in Israel/Palestine and the Middle East, with immense civilian and cultural losses. Nonetheless, I managed to continue my work to a large extent, building on long-established networks of trust and scholarly exchange with Palestinian scholars, educators and community activists.
Archaeological excavations revealed a large Mamluk settlement at Bayt Lay. However, the site is absent from the written record and it is difficult to historicise the findings from the silent evidence of material culture remains. Bayt Lay’s importance lies in its obscurity. Being a marginal khirba (ruin), the likes of which exist in the Southern Levant in their thousands, the site highlights the general value of oral sources and local knowledge for tracing the people and lifeways of the Ottoman countryside. This aim was achieved by incorporating living history and memory of the local populace into a wider archaeological project.
The study revealed the site’s subsidiary connections to the neighbouring village of Idhna (today in the West Bank) in its post-abandonment phase. Following the Ottoman land reforms of 1858, the authorities allocated uncultivated lands to inhabited villages. Idhna absorbed Bayt Lay and adjacent ruins covering 34 km2 of land. Idhna’s residents held possession of Bayt Lay in common, in a local land tenure called “mushā’”. Cultivation was rotated between Idhna’s clans on a bi-annual basis. Because of the lands’ distance from Idhna, residents established seasonal quarters in the khirba. The rugged lands surrounding Bayt Lay provided pasturage for Idhna’s livestock, and the underground cavities on site served as winter shelters for the flocks, as was the norm with other sites in the region. Marāḥ Bayt Lay, the fertile vale south of the site, was sown with wheat and barley during winter, and dhurra, lentils and vetch during summer. Even after Bayt Lay’s occupation in 1948, Idhna’s residents maintained their connection to the site by crossing the border to harvest grain, graze their flocks and conduct illicit antiquities looting among the ruins, which they regard as theirs.
This study of Beit Loya has raised unresolved questions like “who were the residents”? “Where did they come from”? “And where did they go”? While being of prime importance for any archaeologist, the answers to those questions are often not available in the archaeological record – and thus lie beyond the reach of the archaeologists/excavators. For recent periods, ethnographic and oral sources, such as those used in this project, have the potential to answer these questions, allowing for the framing of sites within their proper social, economic, political and cultural contexts.
