The Grape Mounds

The story

On the slopes of the hills around the ancient cities of the Negev — Shivta, Nitzana, Halutza, Rehovot ba-Negev, Avdat and Mamshit — tens of thousands of small stone heaps are spread, about a meter in diameter and about half a meter high, two to three meters apart from one another and arranged in an array. The Bedouin called them tuleilat al-inab (تليلات العنب), the grape mounds, and also rujum al-kurum (رجوم الكروم), the cairns of the vineyards. The first to describe them in research were the orientalist Edward Henry Palmer and the zoologist Charles Drake, in 1870 in the area of Auja al-Hafir, and they surmised that the stones served for growing vines — hence the name. The systematic research was done by Prof. Yehuda Kedar, who published in 1967 “Ancient Agriculture in the Negev Mountains”, and his conclusion was different: the stone heaps exposed the soil and channeled the surface runoff and the loess dust downward to the streambeds, where the water and the soil gathered into fields. Michael Avi-Yonah reached a similar conclusion, and Prof. Moshe Shachak surmised that they served grazing. All the research that came after Palmer and Drake therefore ties the mounds to water and to soil, and not to the vine whose name clung to them.

• Nabataean
• Archaeology
• Water and wells
• Desert