12 



DRY-LAND OLIVE CULTURE IN NORTHERN AFRICA. 



was this article in the ancient commerce of the country that, as the 

 local tradition has it, one of the cities near the eastern coast built a 

 conduit solely for the purpose of transporting oil to its seaport. 



The Arab invaders, being a pastoral and not an agricultural people, 

 are said to have wantonly destroyed the olive orchards in order to 

 create pastures for their flocks. More probably the orchards gradu- 

 ally died out from neglect, large numbers of the original inhabitants 

 of the country having been killed or driven from their farms by the 

 invaders, who neither knew nor cared anything about tree culture. 

 During the centuries that followed, the country was in too turbulent 

 a state to make a restoration of the olive orchards possible. More- 

 over, the decline of Rome and the destruction of commerce on the 

 Mediterranean put an end to the foreign trade in oil and left Tunis 

 without a market for its surplus production. 



However this may be, only mere fragments of this magnificent for- 

 est of olives remain to-day in southern Tunis. In the northern part 

 of the country, where the rainfall is much greater and the trees can 

 exist without the use of special cultural methods to conserve moisture 

 in the soil, olive growing has continued without interruption down to 

 the present time. 



DRY-LAND OLIVE CULTURE IN MODERN TUNIS. 



At a few points along the coast in central and southern Tunis 

 the orchards never disappeared entirely, and within the last century 

 a notable effort has been made to reestablish the ancient condition of 

 things in the neighborhood of Sfax, a thriving seaport on the eastern 

 coast (fig. 1). The work was begun by the inhabitants on their 

 own initiative, hesitatingly and inefficiently at first. About 1840 the 

 system of planting and of tillage now in use was introduced or 

 revived a by one of the more intelligent natives, and from that time 

 the progress was rapid. When the French occupied Sfax in 1881 

 the orchards already covered 45,000 acres, and up to that time Euro- 

 peans had had no part in the work. . 



During the last twenty years most of the new orchards have been 

 created by French capitalists, although native laborers have been 

 almost exclusively employed and the cultural methods are essentially 

 those in use before the. country was occupied by Europeans. Be- 



a In all probability the system of wide spacing of the trees and tborongb till- 

 age is not a recent invention, but was in use by tbe Romans more than .1,500 

 years ago. These practices, or at least the tradition of them, doubtless con- 

 tinued to exist in the region through all the centuries of the Arab domination, 

 to be brought once more into general use during the past century. 

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