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Document Details : Title: Habitat, bâti et aménagements ruraux dans la plaine de Ras Shamra au début du XXe siècle Author(s): JACOB-ROUSSEAU, Nicolas , GEYER, Bernard Journal: Semitica Volume: 61 Date: 2019 Pages: 265-291 DOI: 10.2143/SE.61.0.3286694 Abstract : One of the means at our disposal to reveal past realities is the use of archives, particularly old photographs, writings of travelers or scholars (here since the late seventeenth century) and old maps. This documentary corpus, and especially photographs taken in the 1930s over the Ras Shamra region, in the Latakia’s sahel, allows us to visualize and analyze ancient spatial organizations that are difficult to detect today because of great changes in vegetation and growth of urban areas. Landscape archeology offers us a key to reading territories where vestiges are potentially numerous, ancient; it allows us to understand factors for the location of sites. The work focused on the organization of built space and the development of plain before the major landscape changes that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. It turns out that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, inhabited sites were few, mostly consisting of small villages or hamlets and rare isolated farms, close to natural water points. Buildings remain modest and their construction reflects resources available locally: abundance of stone and relative scarcity of wood. Agricultural development mainly takes place in a space close to the habitat: areas to beat, oil presses, saqiya wells or small canals. River developments, which remain localized however, are the only ones to present some scale. |
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