Human impact on the landscape around Al-Rawda (Syria) during the Early Bronze IV : evidence for exploitation, occupation and appropriation of the land.
Résumé
The work undertaken since 2002 by the Franco-Syrian team on the site of Tell Al-Rawda has led to confirmation that this was a new city constructed in the steppe in the middle of the third millennium and abandoned only a few centuries after its foundation, about 2200 BC (radiocarbon determinations calibrated through Bayesian analysis ). The work of B. Geyer’s team (“Mission des Marges Arides”) had already shown that Al-Rawda was positioned on the eastern edge of a front of colonisation that developed in the Early Bronze IV, before these places were abandoned by sedentary populations to be later resettled for a relatively brief period in the Byzantine period. The arid context gives rise to questions concerning the subsistence conditions of a population that, although difficult to estimate, would appear high in relation to the potential resources offered by this environment. This population would certainly have had an impact in terms of exploitation and modification of a fragile environment; today we observe a slow degradation over the long term, although this is not possible to define it temporally. Can we learn how the population of the second half of the third millennium in this region organised and exploited this territory? What were the reasons for this relatively brief occupation? What were the environmental constraints that the population had to face and that required adaptation, and what led to the abandonment of this territory?