Rural adaptation and settlement change in the late Islamic Jabal al-Khalīl (Judean Foothills)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the transformation of rural settlement in the Shephelah region of Ottoman Palestine as a reflection of communal adaptation to changes in the political and security landscapes. Focusing on Khirbet Drūsye (Horvat Midras), we integrate archaeological evidence with Ottoman fiscal surveys and Sharia court registers to trace the site's transition from a prosperous Mamluk-era village to a seasonal habitation ( ʿizbeh ) by the 1550s. This spatial reconfiguration illustrates how rural communities modified their settlement patterns and economic strategies in response to the declining security environment during the Early Ottoman period. The study of Drūsye, alongside other cases in the southern Bilād al-Shām/Levant, highlights not only the diverse ways that settlement systems evolved in response to political and economic pressures but also reveals sophisticated settlement patterns that challenge our understanding of 'permanent' versus 'transient' occupation. More broadly, the case demonstrates the methodological value of combining archaeological and documentary sources to reconstruct historical geographies and understand local responses to imperial transition. Beyond its regional focus, the case of Drūsye demonstrates a more general lesson: rural communities under imperial regimes often developed flexible, hybrid strategies of land use that challenge simple distinctions between permanence and abandonment. Such adaptive patterns have relevance for comparative studies of frontier zones, resilience, and the archaeology of ‘decline’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".