Page 112 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

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described Bahrain as having 300 villages and as cultivating grapes and citrus fruits
(Stiffe 1901). His claim of 300 villages may be an exaggeration or may have applied
to the mainland as well. The combined total of modern villages and archeological
settlement sites hardly attains half this number on the island of Bahrain. The
presence of citrus fruits and grapes is an interesting observation. Such fruits are
normally grown as intercrops with dates and vegetables and may have been an
identifiable export item. No mention was made of grains, however. Bahrain began
to take on some of the characteristics of the modern market economy in the
fourteenth century, when Manama was mentioned for the first time as a market
center (Rentz and Mulligan 1960:941-44) and settlement was extensive. The
arrangement of settlements shown in Figure 13 is similar to the modern distribution
of villages about the city of Manama. The major difference is the cluster of
medieval sites located on the extreme southwest coast. This portion of the island
is now virtually abandoned. The sites of this period show a loose grouping into
three clusters with the largest located along the north coast of the island near
Manama, a second midway along the west coast, and a third represented by the
southernmost group. All but the southern sites occur in close proximity to modern
artesian springs.
The close approximation to the modern village pattern suggests a
comparable preindustrial land use. While pearls continued to make up the luxury
export of Bahrain during this period, date production was also a major agricultural
market. Tliis use can be inferred from the coincidence of the northernmost cluster
of sites with the traces of former date gardens covering the same area. The
centrally located cluster of sites coincides with modern areas of isolated date
gardens along the west coast which were once supplied by artesian water via qanat
systems. These qanats transport water directly to the garden areas where they
empty into bifurcating canal networks. Medieval ceramics found associated with
these irrigation structures point to intensified use during this same period.
Similar patterns of land use continued into the Late Islamic period (fig. 14)
when the same areas were again the sites of concentrated settlements. The main
concentration of villages was along the north coast and extended as far south as