Long-distance trade routes criss-crossed ancient Africa and Eurasia. Archaeological research has focused on the commodities in transit and the excavation of major centres located along these routes, with less attention paid to smaller caravanserai and evidence such as rubbish middens. The ‘Incense Route’ linked the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, with activity peaking during the Nabataean and Roman periods. The authors present the results of test-pit excavations of middens at three small Nabataean–Roman desert caravanserai along the ‘Incense Route’. The assemblages recovered include material culture attesting to wide, inter-regional connections, combined with archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data illuminating the subsistence basis of the caravan trade.

Various archaeological and historical evidence shows that the marginal area of the Negev desert of southern Israel enjoyed great agricultural prosperity in the Byzantine period (4th–7th centuries CE). Among the different types of agricultural installations are pigeon towers, which were built near the fields to produce fertilizer to enrich the nutrient-poor desert soils. Such extensive specialized agriculture practice was much less applied in the Negev in the successive Early Islamic period in the mid-7th century. Here we recovered in situ pigeon bones from five pigeon towers in the Negev, applied multiple characterization methods (FTIR, grinding curve, and C/N ratio) to estimate the preservation of bones, and achieved absolute dating for the abandonment of the towers. The obtained dates indicate rapid decline of agricultural activities in the second half of the 6th century CE and beginning of the 7th century. These findings, together with other evidence for Byzantine decline of agricultural hinterland and urban dysfunction of the settlements, suggest that the farming activities in the Negev declined in the Late Byzantine period (550–640 CE) and support the hypothesis that climatic-driven causes were the main trigger for the eventual cultural-societal decline of the Negev region.

A previously unknown painting of Christ’s face, recently discovered at the Byzantine site of Shivta in the Negev Desert of southern Israel, represents the first pre-iconoclastic baptism-of-Christ scene to be found in the Holy Land.

Lessons from history on sustainability, collapse and resilience are theultimate goal of the Byzantine Bio-Archaeology Research Program of the Negev(BYBAN) (Tepper et al. 2015). Addressing the unprecedentedflourishing and collapse of the Byzantine Negev agricultural settlements(fourth–seventh centuries AD), the BYBAN project offers a unique andoriginal approach. It focuses on ancient middens and domestic contexts,which provide an exceptional focus on the materiality of daily life.Archaeobotanical research is central to this project because the copiousplant remains retrieved are a reflection of the region's agriculturaleconomy and its environmental sustainability. This approach will enable usto answer important research questions about the Byzantine–Islamictransition in the Negev: what were the major cash and subsistence crops?Which were grown locally, and which, if any, were imported? How, if at all,did the agricultural economy change during the Byzantine–Islamic transition?Were there any major changes in climatic conditions, and, if so, can they beimplicated as a cause for agricultural collapse?