 So first I want to thank everybody for being here and thank our organizers. My name is Kathleen Forsty. I am a PhD student at Boston University. And in this presentation, I will be giving some preliminary results of some of my ongoing dissertation research. And basically what I'm trying to do is understand from an archaeobotanical perspective the types of plant resources available to people in two coastal sites in the Levant and understand kind of how they were being used by looking specifically at the contexts where they're found. So I'm looking at Ashgillon and Caesarea Meritima. And Ashgillon is located on the southern coastal plain or the Philistine plain. And it's built atop some of these typical sandstone or sandy mounds. Human occupation was concentrated on two tells, the north and the south tell. And Caesarea Meritima, by contrast, is pretty flat. The site is located directly on the coast adjacent to its manmade harbor. And excavations of the early Islamic occupation have concentrated on area LL, which is a coastal warehouse turned residential area, and the temple platform, which is the large monumental focus of the site. So these sites both have long periods, or both multi-period sites with a long history of being urban centers and important trading ports in the Mediterranean economy. But during the early Islamic period, they were slightly smaller in size than they had been in previous periods. However, they remain centers of commerce and culture. Archaeological evidence shows that at Ashgillon there were metallurgy workshops and that it had a close relationship with Egypt, closer than other sites in the Levant. At Caesarea, there's evidence for oil and wine pressing, as well as grain storage. In terms of the Islamic occupation, both of these cities were some of the last to fall to the Muslim conquerors and were conquered by treaty in 640 CE. Environmentally, they're relatively similar, difference mainly being that the northern coastal plain receives more precipitation than the southern coastal plain. But generally, these areas are really great for serial cultivation. And the potential of irrigation makes it possible to grow orchards and fruit trees. Some of the previous research done has been conducted by Jen Ramsey and Ken Holom, who published their findings in 2015. And basically what they found was a local agricultural economy that has a lot of continuity with the earlier Byzantine period. They found primarily barley and bread wheat. They found chaff to suggest local processing. And the wild weeds that they found point to local cultivation. My professor, Mac Morrison, and I have a chapter in press about the non-wood botanical remains from Ashkelon. And I'm going to basically expand upon some of our findings in this presentation. We find a situation similar to Caesarea in that some of the stable crops are bread wheat and barley. There were a few legumes found, a few parts of chaff, and a ton of fruit, though. We found olive, no surprise, grape, no surprise. But what stuck out to us was this concentration of prunus pits, so pits from fruits like cherry, peach, and plum. And we interpret those to be the remains of industrial fuel that had been used in metallurgy or bone working. So in this paper, I'll be looking at wood and non-wood remains from specific contexts to investigate the agricultural cycle, evidence for land use practices, and wood resources and their acquisition. So the data sets here primarily are an assemblage of 99 samples from Ashkelon, six of which have had their wood analyzed. And they come from a series of residential and industrial contexts. From Caesarea, I have 15 samples that are different from the previous research by Ramsey and Hullam. And five of these samples have had their wood analyzed. And they come from residential contexts. In terms of land use, there's maybe some suggestion for irrigation. At both sites, a water-loving plant called Rumex, or dock, was identified. At Caesarea, there's evidence that perhaps aqueducts had been used to bring water to the site, but there's no such architectural evidence at Ashkelon. Primarily, there are fieldweeds that are typically found growing among cereals or are local to the area. Looking at the economic seeds from Ashkelon, we see, obviously, it's dominated by cereals and fruit, like I said before. And these are primarily winter-grown crops that could be grown locally and fruits that could be harvested locally late into the summer or into the winter. There was one unique context in that we found a burned room off of a private courtyard that had over 1,900 grains of bread wheat and more than 200 grains of barley. So this was really unique compared to the number of seeds we found elsewhere. We also found those concentrations of fruit pits. So these two caches kind of skew the data here. So in order to really understand the most frequently occurring taxa, we looked to ubiquity. So again, kind of no surprise, we have barley and bread wheat as the most commonly occurring identified wheat and pea as the most commonly occurring legume, although they were very few. Fruits, no surprise, all of us the most ubiquitous followed by grape. But a unique find here was a legume that we identified as cowpea or vigna umbriculata. They're only really present in small fragments and they've only been identified at two other sites that we're aware of, Custera Alcadine, which has come up before, and some sites in the Middle Euphrates Valley. We're not sure if this is something that's been introduced from its domestication area of Western Africa, you know, or if this is something that was locally grown. So again, we can't quite trace this idea of, you know, diffusion versus introduction. There's Custera Alcadine. So shifting gears now and looking at the Caesarea assemblage, it contains fragmentary pieces of barley and bread wheat and olive pits. Mostly the legumes were indeterminate, but there were some lentil and grass pea identified. And again, my weeds correlated to Ramsey and Hulums in that they're mostly local things that grew around the site or typical cereal weeds. When we look at the agricultural cycle based on the flowering times, we see that all those plants had a pretty good match from all these datasets. They primarily flowered in kind of the springtime which corresponds well to a harvest time for winter-grown crops. So we still have this traditional agricultural cycle here, no evidence yet for the summer cultivation which Watson argued was part of this revolution. Moving on to the wood charcoal analysis, the wood charcoal from these assemblages were very brittle. It made it really hard to get clean breaks to look at the cross sections. And anyone who has worked with charcoal can understand those difficulties. A lot of the microscopic features were also burned away by the process of carbonization too. There was a lot of overlap in the taxa identified from the wood charcoal from both of these sites, but the main differences were that at Ashkelon, they, Ashkelon had Zizafis and a lot of angiosperm indeterminate that Caesarea didn't have, but Caesarea had a lot more of this indeterminate Fagaceae. I couldn't determine if it was a certain type of oak or not. But basically the similarities end there because what we see is a really different pattern in where these different types of wood charcoal are found. So looking at the few samples that have their wood charcoal identified, we have one taboom context and a floor associated with the taboom that's really dominated by gymnosperm wood, which suggests that gymnosperms, softwood like pines and conifers were used as fuel. There were some angiosperm pieces that were found across the floors, including this locally available Quercus cojifera or Quercus caliprinos. Of the potential fuel remnants from the taboom and associated floor, some of the microscopic analysis suggests that some of these gymnosperm pieces are pineus pineaea based on these cupricioid pits. However, at Ashkelon, the gymnosperms weren't found in potential fuel deposits. They were found in construction deposits. So there was a context of room collapse with giant beams of wood that had collapsed onto the floor. Samples were taken from there and it was identified as gymnosperm wood. More detailed analysis is ongoing to see what kind of gymnosperm this is, but it's not hardwood, it's the main points. The angiosperm wood on the other hand was found in kitchen wastes and industrial wastes suggesting that it was used as fuel. And so this was different like we said from Caesarea because gymnosperm was fuel at Caesarea. Angiosperm seems to be fuel at Ashkelon. We also found monocot wood in the kitchen waste. And so I'm not sure if this is deep palm or some sort of reed that might grow along the coast. But we suspect that this is the remains of some sort of basket container or maybe even like wicker furniture that may have been present in the households or used in the kitchen. It could be easy to imagine if you accidentally like scorch a wicker basket as you're cooking over a fire. However, keeping in mind that the vegetation around the coast is generally lacking in trees. And given the fact that there's a really long history of occupation here and a subsequent use of many of the woody resources in the area, it makes me think about alternative fuel sources that people had available at the coast. There's a really long and well-known history of using like press cakes from oil and grape pressing. But there's not so much known about these really dense, oily, high-burning fruit pits. And so one of the reasons why we think that these fruit pits were used as industrial fuel is because they were found alongside a lot of metal slag, a lot of fragments of obviously worked bones. And so these concentrations of these pits occurred in much higher frequency than in other places. So five to 10 times more pits or fruit pits in these industrial deposits than elsewhere across the site. So while there's not much known archaeologically about these fruit pits being used as fuel, there's a lot of modern biofuel research being done to look at fruit pits as alternative fuel sources. What's interesting though, some of the fruit pits we identified were Zizafis spina Christi and we have identified some potential Zizafis wood. So we have an interesting matching of the fruit pits and the wood from the plant. So to summarize, basically what we have at Ashkelon and Caesarea Maritima when we look kind of context by context, we see mostly local grown winter agricultural crops with the one possibility of maybe something being imported or a new introduction. I don't know if it would follow Daniel's criteria for an innovation or introduction but we can talk about that later. We see a couple different scales of storage here. We have the cache of grains at Ashkelon and we have the architectural remains of grain bins at Caesarea which suggests more of a commercial storage but there weren't any grains found that I'm aware of associated with those contexts. We have different evidences for alternative fuel in industry and when we're looking at the wood charcoal it's really not clear if we see these differences in use of what's being used as fuel versus construction is a result of differences in behaviors and uses of these resources or if it's simply a sample issue because my samples that are identified with the wood charcoal is so small right now. So basically looking at the context of where these archipetanical remains come from can help us understand the patterns of consumption and resource use in this time period as with all. So as I continue this work I will be identifying more wood charcoal and investigating this correlation between fruit endocarps and wood charcoal looking at evidence for local or boriculture. Eventually I will compare the results from these coastal settlements to more inland settlements to kind of look at geographically and environmentally what differences may occur based on access to resources on the coast and in like the Judean highlands. So with that I want to thank you for your attention and for bearing with us with those technical difficulties and I look forward to the discussions. Thank you.