Land for the Fellahin, V.

The article focuses on the land use in the Near East. In Lebanon, one can see in a relatively circumscribed area a kind of recapitulation of several millennia of agricultural development, and practices which make use of the most modern as well as of age-old techniques. A caterpillar tractor is used to pull gang plows within a stone's throw of a farmer who is still driving oxen round an ancient threshing floor to trample out the grain, just as his forefathers did for ages past There are curious blends of primitive and modern techniques. At Zahle, in the Bequaa plain of Lebanon, the old threshing sleds were still in use on the threshing floors but they were pulled not by oxen but by a tractor. Farming of these mountain slopes is a perpetual battle against the elements. Unless infinite care is taken, the rain and snow storms of winter will remove every trace of soil, which can be held in place only by a complex system of terraces. Many mountain slopes are completely made over. For thousands of vertical feet, every horizontal field a yard wide has its equivalent yard or more of perpendicular wall. The entire mountainside has been so completely made over that it is hard to imagine what the original landscape was like. This is indeed a mature cultural landscape.