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Lecture (in French and English). “Deserting Confusion: Why and How to Define Oases? | Déserter la confusion: pourquoi et comment définir les oasis?”
given for the conference “Quelles oasis anciennes dans la péninsule Arabique ? Approches méthodologiques plurielles”,
CNRS Campus of Thiais (France)
Sept. 26th, 2024 – 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The conference was held as part of the seminar “Anthropization, Environmental Management, and Landscape Dynamics” (LGP, UMR 8591 UPEC-Paris 1-CNRS)
Organized by Vladimir Dabrowski and Aline Garnier,
With financial support from the Laboratoire de Géographie Physique (LGP, UMR 8591), the LabEx DynamiTe, and the al-‘Ulā Anthropological Survey project.
– Abstract:
The notion of an “oasis” is far from unambiguous. In ordinary European representations, it often evokes a body of water fringed with palm trees; in some naturalistic approaches, it may refer more broadly to a “ fertility island” in an arid environment; in archaeology, finally, the presence of crops or date-palm remains may sometimes lead to the identification of an oasis. Yet these different usages do not necessarily refer to the same object. The talk therefore revisited the conditions required for a scientific definition of the oasis, notably in order to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Sahara and Arabia, I argued for an etic, functional, and deliberately flexible definition of the oasis: “an oasis is the association of a human settlement with a cultivated and irrigated area—often a palm grove—in an arid environment.” This definition emphasizes the fundamentally anthropogenic nature of the oasis: it requires labour, knowledge and know-how, a social organization of access to water and land, and integration into networks of exchange. An oasis is therefore neither a simple plant formation nor a natural island of fertility, but an agroecosystem constructed and maintained by societies.
The aim was not to freeze the diversity of oases within an overly rigid typology, but to provide an explicit comparative tool that would then make it possible to study their variations across space and time. The talk therefore concluded with several questions addressed to archaeology: is the oasis model universal? Can it exist without palm trees or without private property? How do oases emerge, how are labour and techniques organized within them, and through what processes can they disappear? These questions invite us to use the definition of the oasis as a methodological instrument rather than as a self-evident category.
