Blurb:

Chapter Eight is a survey of the textual record on this site and the villages and farmland in its vicinity, providing the historical backdrop for the archaeological, botanical/faunal, and terrace studies (and simultaneously interpreting their collective results in a historical perspective). The textual record includes a wide range of largely unpublished documents – in the form of court and tax registers, endowment records, legal and agrarian manuals – and the more familiar genres of chronicles, geographies and travelers’ accounts. These texts together allow for an assessment of the political, economic, and social factors behind the development of the farmstead and its fields, from the 14th through 19th centuries. The chapter then culminates with a new assessment of the relationship of medieval Jerusalem with its rural hinterland and the role of commercialization of agriculture in this regard.