Page 114 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

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the village of Ali. The west coast villages were also roughly congruent with those
of the medieval period. Thus, these land use patterns were virtually identical to
those of the previous few centuries. While abandonment of some of the peripheral
land areas in the extreme south may have taken place during this time, the
irrigation of west coast villages continued via qanats, although a series of
contemporary hand-excavated wells were located at the mouths of wadis draining
the western slopes of the central dome. Traces of abandoned gardens at these
locations indicate groundwater extraction to irrigate additional gardens. The
mechanism used to extract groundwater here is not clear, but may have involved
the shaduf or similar lifting device. We are still uncertain how significant this
agricultural area may have been, but on the basis of the ceramic evidence and the
condition of certain stone-lined wells, this same land area continued in use into
recent times when we know the actual relationship between gardens and water
sources. This is shown in Figure 15 by the position of springs, wells, qanats, and
garden areas as mapped by Italconsult (1971).
There were certain readjustments which took place during the Late
Islamic period that carried on into industrial times, but the initial expansion in land
use during the Islamic Era was underway in late medieval times. The Late Islamic
period, including the entry of the Portuguese into the gulf and the subsequent
control of Bahrain by Safavid Persia, is of less importance than the medieval
interval. A distinct period of land abandonment in the southern region began at
this time and marked the onset of a long period of settlement retreat that was only
reversed during the past century. Thus, the abandoned date gardens that Durand
(1879) discussed at the end of the nineteenth century were an expression of a long
period of land abandonment related to a complex history of changing land use.

The Time-Space Perspective

Mapping spatial arrays of archeological sites of similar age develops an
appreciation for the arrangement of sites in time and space, Although each
archeologically dated interval of changing settlement array has been reported as a