Land use and land abandonment: A case study from the Wadi Al-Hasa, West-central Jordan

Understanding the past record of human/environmental interaction requires consideration of factors affecting land management decisions. General models of land use often emphasize the role of political complexity in affecting decision-making. They note that more hierarchical societies have both greater demand for surplus production and a greater ability to extract it. The less visible component of the decision-making process is the resistance of producers to elite designs. This dynamic among competing interests, in a context of shifting resources, shapes the land anew each generation.; In this dissertation, the continual restructuring of costs and benefits of land use among small-scale producers is examined in the Wadi al-Hasa, West-central Jordan. An archaeological, historical and environmental record spanning the Holocene is evaluated using a series of land metrics to model agropastoral production. Land use is considered as it changed with regard to political organization and the effects of previous land use. Using statistical measures of spatial autocorrelation and Geographic Information System (GIS) calculations of susceptibility to erosion, cycles of location abandonment and subsequent avoidance are documented. Spatial segregation of archaeological sites is documented repeatedly from one period to the next, reflecting periodic movement of the locus of land use and avoidance of areas used in preceding generations. Variable susceptibility to erosion is evaluated using the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), illustrating a higher degree of spatial segregation in more sensitive lands and a fluctuating tendency to exploit sensitive lands followed by their abandonment. Comparing these cycles with a history of variable political organization, this researcher demonstrates that land use is affected by the tension between elite and commoner goals. Centralized authorities repeatedly encourage intensification of land use in the Hasa. Such developments are ultimately unsustainable, however, and each cycle of intensification is followed by abandonment as agropastoralists find the benefits of production outweighed by costs in a given location. Populations in the Hasa maintained the ability to resist authority and return to a nomadic life when it became advantageous, thus emphasizing the power of local groups to pursue alternative strategies when the experience of costs and benefits diverged.