Page 120 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

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such a zonation in land use also applies at smaller scales such as the individual
farmsteads or villages, where a decrease in labor intensity with distance reaches a
generally critical level at 1 km. This same spatial pattern applies to the villages of
Bahrain.
Figure 17 shows the maximum distances from villages on Bahrain to the
most distant garden farmed by that village. These data were scaled from maps of
the garden holdings for each village (al-Mohammed et al. 1975). The calculated
mean distance to the farthest garden for this sample of 51 villages is 0.967 km. In
addition, this histogram shows a skewed bimodal distribution with subordinate
peaks at ca. 0.8 km and ca. 11 km. The skewed distribution reflects a greater
number of closely packed villages in the Manama area with smaller diameter
agricultural perimeters than those villages on the western coastal plain. The
bimodal distribution of these village-garden relationships remains unexplained.
During the medieval and late Islamic periods, however, settlement and land use
showed at least two similar clusters of archeological sites, one along the north
coast, and another along the west coast. A similar array of modern villages is also
visible in Figure 1. Thus, there is an apparent bias to the distribution of these
settlement sites.
Minimization of effort affected past settlement patterns in one way or
another. Dates, vegetables, and fruits were doubtless distributed in a generalized
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von Thunen format in relation to the urban center of the time. During the Islamic
periods, but especially during the late medieval and early Late Islamic intervals,
Bahrain was at its agricultural peak. Grapes and citrus fruits were likely cash
crops and were raised in close proximity to Manama. Then as now, vegetables,
fodder, and dates were the leading crops of the north coast and were grown in close
proximity to the urban center. Less intensive date gardens extended southward
along the west coast. Grain cultivation, while never a major item mentioned in
historic accounts probably followed the von 'Hunen model, occupying a land-use
zone at the fringes of the intensely cultivated gardens. Finally, herding of sheep
and goats may have taken place in the peripheral areas away from the extensive
cultivation zones.