KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
Governing Property, Chapters 10 and 12). A question arises however in the case of villages for which
the nüfus records have not survived. It was Ottoman practice to make two copies of tapu registers, the
one for preservation at the centre, the other for use in the kaza. Was the practice not maintained for
the nüfus, only abstracts of population being returned to the centre? If a second copy of the original
record was in fact sent back to the centre it would be of inestimable value for those central copies to
be opened for access to research.
My second point is methodological and has two aspects. The first aspect is the amount of time
required to piece together connections between the various historical sources mentioned above in order
to construct a picture of socio-economic conditions of a village or region for a given period of time.
Given the minimal character of tapu registration compared with, say, the various papers comprising
the records of rights in the Punjab during British rule, a researcher is forced to make use of as many
sources as possible. But such work is not done in a day. In our research Martha Mundy and I picked
for analytical comparison two villages in the Hauran plains and two villages in the Aclun hills, in order
to trace patterns of land use in neighbouri