The Crusaders' settlement of Palestine in the 12th and 13th centuries has been seen in terms of the domination of a native peasantry by an alien military elite and as Europe's first experiment in overseas colonization. This monograph attempts to shed light on the effects that the crusader conquest of AD 1099 would have on the pattern of settlement in the country by considering one particular part of it, the central Sharon Plain. In 1983 excavations conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem at the Red Tower, a small Crusader castle situated in the centre of the plain, were combined with a programme of archaeological field survey in the surrounding region.

There are chapters on history and architecture, as well as a full descriptive gazetteer of sites in the central Sharon plain occupied between 1099 and 1516, giving an invaluable picture of the impact the Crusaders had on the region.