ABSTRACT
Extensive traces of ancient desert agriculture have been found in most deserts of the old world in the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa. The Englishman Palmer was the first European to discover, in 1869, these ancient installations in the Negev and to wonder how it was once possible to cultivate the land in an area which at his time was a barren desert. Many years ago Joseph Waitz, the late director of the Jewish National Fund, visited the steppe and desert region of South Tunisia and saw that the peasants there successfully grew olive and palm trees in “microcatchments” by using runoff as a water source. The early French explorers of the region were the first to observe the many traces of agriculture in a region which is a desert without any cultivation. The vegetation and rainfall in the areas in which ancient desert agriculture was carried out were more or less identical to those of today.
