Photo: Yaakov Shmidov | Israel Antiquities Authority
Archaeologists believe that more than 1,000 years ago, Israel’s Caesarea coast was the birthplace of a complicated system of vegetable farms on sandy beaches that took over a million workdays to build and could provide useful information about growing in hot sandy climates for modern farmers dealing with desertification. The plot-and-berm agroecosystem, which dates to the 15th-18th century in Spain and Portugal, is still used today on a small scale in northwestern Portugal. Geomorphologist Joel Roskin envisions that the beach could one day host a community garden, similar to an educational farm in the Jerusalem Hills which recreates ancient mountain agriculture practices. “We should keep up the awareness of these traditional systems, and we need to think how they can adapt to the current or future situation [of climate change],” he said.
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