Kasla

The village stood on the top of an elongated mountain that stretched from east to west, overlooking two deep wadis on the northern and southern sides. The village itself was north of a secondary road that ran across the mountain in an east-west direction. The road intersected a highway to the east, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and crossed another highway to the west that ran between Bayt Jibrin (in the Hebron sub-disctrict) and the Jerusalem−Jaffa highway. Kasla has been identified with the site of the Canaanite city of Chesalon (Joshua 15:10). It was a large village known as Chesalon or Cheslon in the Roman period. In 1596 Kasla (or Kisla) was a village in the nahiya of Ramla (liwa' of Gaza) with a population of sixty-one. It paid taxes on wheat, barley, sesame, and fruit trees as well as on goats and beehives.

In the late nineteenth century, Kasla was described as a village on top of a rugged ridge with a deep valley to the north. Two springs in the valley and another to the east provided the villagers with water. The village plan was rectangular in shape. Most of its houses, which were built of stone, extended in an east-west direction along the secondary road; a few houses were built east of the village center along this road. The people of Kasla were Muslim; they maintained a shrine for a Shaykh Ahmad. Water for domestic use came from several springs around the village.

Agriculture was based on olives, fruit, and grain, which were planted in the lowlands and valley floors; crops were rainfed and irrigated from springs. Some lands were used as grazing areas, especially in the steep rugged slopes. In 1944/45 a total of 2,265 dunums was allotted to cereals; 440 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, of which 203 dunums were devoted to olive cultivation. The village was itself an archaeological site and was surrounded by several khirbas that contained the ruins of walls, cisterns, and carved stones.