For historians of the Middle East, medieval documents and manuscripts are integral resources to better understand the social and intellectual milieu of their objects of study. Islamic manuscript archives and repositories are often quite challenging to access; an even greater challenge is the ability to read and analyze the documents themselves. For the past eight years, and during my 2024 ACOR-NEH Fellowship, I have spent a significant amount of time pursuing documentary and textual research at the Center for Documents and Manuscripts (CDM) at the University of Jordan while finishing my book project, Blasphemy (Sabb al-Rasūl) as a Legal Category in Early and Medieval Islamic History. Located within several blocks of ACOR, the CDM contains more than 30,000 manuscripts from the Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman eras. In addition to preserving physical manuscripts, for the past thirty years the CDM has also pursued another important project: digitizing manuscript collections from across the Levant and North Africa. With the onset of the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, and now with ongoing violence in Lebanon, many of these regional collections are either no longer accessible or entirely destroyed, making the CDM’s digitized collection all the more an indispensable resource for researchers. 

Colleagues in other fields often ask me how I read and analyze manuscripts and documentary records in order to deduce historically relevant information. How does one determine a manuscript’s date of creation, scribal history, and authorship? What codicological clues does one use, in terms of the document’s material construction, handwriting, and illumination in order to date a manuscript and determine whether it is authentic? I address these questions in a three-part series. In my first Insights essay, I addressed the material construction of Ottoman codices and how historians examine certain aspects of medieval book construction in order to date a manuscript. In my second, I examined how researchers use calligraphic script identification and manuscript illumination to deduce the age and geographic origins of a manuscript, with special focus on the Mamluk era. In both of the aforementioned essays, I focused on books as historical objects, which often contain a plethora of clues that allow us to pursue accurate dating. But what happens when one only has a fragment of a page or a documentary record that is not part of a book? Such a scenario is far more common, especially in eras predating the Mamluk Empire, such as the Ayyubid and Fatimid eras. In this third installment, I shall address how historians use handwriting, text format, and material construction of fragments to estimate the age of a manuscript, with special attention to the Ayyubid and Fatimid eras.

Dating Documents Based on Material Construction

An important clue when attempting to identify the era and region in which a document was produced is examining the material construction. In Figure 1, the first attribute that jumps out to a trained historian is the fact that the artifact consists of porous and fibrous cross-laid strips. This texture indicates that the artifact is not made from paper, but rather from papyrus. Papyrus strips are paper-like, self-adhering sheets made from the stalk of the papyrus plant, which is indigenous to Africa, including Egypt. Papyrus was used as a material upon which to write in a variety of local languages in Egypt from about 3000 BCE to the 10^th century CE. After Alexander the Great seized Egypt from the Achaemenid Empire in the 4^th century BCE, Greek emerged as the primary written language of government administration, literature, and private document production. It remained so during the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine eras and was only replaced with Arabic in the 7^th century, after the Arab conquest. We also know that after the 10^th century CE, paper become the predominant material for writing in North Africa (for more on this topic, see Khan 2006; Goldberg and Krakowski 2019). Hence, based on the fact that the document is written on papyrus and that it is written in Arabic, we can deduce that it was most likely produced between the 7^th and 10^th centuries in Egypt. It is also possible that the papyrus was produced in Egypt for export and the document was written elsewhere.

Dating Documents Based on Vocabulary and Format

The vocabulary used in a document can also provide clues to confirm usage and dating, especially if patterns exist across a specific genre. The document in Figure 2 is a Fatimid Islamic iqrār, or security agreement. In the Fatimid and Ayyubid eras, Islamic security agreements were written using a very specific battery of formulary in the same sequence and with specific word placement on the page, similar to a modern-day administrative form (for more on this document type see Müller 2008; Lufti 1983). 

In the aforementioned iqrār, we see that the first line constitutes the basmala, or invocation to seek blessings from God. The block of text then begins with the word ‘aqarra’ , followed by specific formulary identifying the litigants, the amount owed, and payment plan, followed by a promise to pay off said debt on the part of the debtor (binding debt clause). On the last line of block text, the date of the agreement is recorded in the bottom left corner, followed by two short lines in the bottom right corner identifying the witnesses (witness confirmation clause), albeit now faded or erased. We know from other social history sources that iqrār documents in this specific format were not produced until the Ayyubid era (Ackerman-Lieberman 2007; Thung 1996). Hence, moving back to Figure 1 above, we are now able to observe some additional clues in dating our text: 1) that the document begins with the basmala and the word ‘aqarra’, the identifying formulary for iqrār documents; and 2) that the document appears to have the date written by the scribe on the last line in the far left corner, albeit faded to the point of partial legibility, as Rajab AH 312, which converts to 924 CE. Bringing together all of the aforementioned evidence on document construction and document vocabulary, we can say that the facts suggest without internal contradiction that the document is an Ayyubid or early Fatimid iqrār record produced toward the beginning of the 10^th century CE. 

In the document in Figure 2, the text and lines are straight and somewhat compressed, with very little space in between each line. One also can observe several areas where erasure and possible re-drafting has been attempted, such as the witness confirmation section on the bottom right corner. On the back of the document is also another unrelated draft that appears to be writing practice of some sort. This is quite different from, for example, the document in Figure 3.

In this Fatimid-era document, the text is curvilinear. We also observe ample spacing with no visible erasures and no drafted documents on the back. We know from the patterns that we have observed in studying manuscript genres from the Ayyubid and Fatimid eras that texts intended for public presentation or for an audience with the caliph and his court were often written in curvilinear script with ample spacing and in specific calligraphic styles. Such is the case in this letter in Figure 3, which was meant to be read to the Fatimid caliph (for more on this topic, see Rustow 2020). Writing materials were expensive and hence needed to be used economically, so documents written for internal administrative purposes, such as court records, were often written in small and economically spaced script, with both sides of the paper used (with no necessary link between the record written on the recto and the record written on the verso) (for a detailed analysis of handwriting and text placement in this context, see Rustow 2019). Therefore, in this case, we can deduce that the document in Figure 2 was likely either a court record or a scribe’s draft not intended for public display or performative reading. 

Manuscript fragments and individual documentary records, not just books, can be decoded and analyzed for clues that tell us more about their content and the social environment in which they were constructed. Altogether, the material construction of a manuscript fragment, coupled with an awareness of the typical vocabulary, format, writing style, and spacing of specific genres, provide clues to the historian regarding the date and geographic origin of a medieval document or manuscript. Such fragments, when studied together with other primary sources, are enormously valuable resources for learning more about medieval societies. 

References

Ackerman-Lieberman, Phillip Isaac. 2007. “A Partnership Culture: Jewish Economic and Social Life Seen through the Legal Documents of the Cairo Geniza.” PhD dissertation. Princeton University.

Khan, Geoffrey. 2006. Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Goldberg, Jessica and Eve Krakowski. 2019. “Introduction: A Handbook for Documentary Geniza Research in the Twenty-First Century.” Jewish History 32: 115–130.

Lutfi, Huda. 1983. “A Study of Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs From al-Quds Relating to Muslim Women.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 26(3): 246–294.  

Müller, Christian. 2008. “Acknowledgement.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, < http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_0166 >. Leiden: Brill.  

Rustow, Marina. 2019. “Fatimid State Documents.” Jewish History 32(2/4): 221–277.

Rustow, Marina. 2020. The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thung, Michael. 1996. “Written Obligations from the 2^nd/8^th to the 4^th/10^th Century.” Islamic Law and Society 3(1): 1–12. 

Sarah Islam’s research focuses on the social and intellectual history of Islamic criminal law, and on how relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the medieval context affected the development of jurisprudence and legal institutional norms across all three communities, despite internal polemics often arguing otherwise. Her first book project, Blasphemy (Sabb al-Rasūl) as a Legal Category in Early and Medieval Islamic History, examines the evolution of blasphemy as a legal category among capital crimes in Islamic legal history. Her research has been supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright Program, and the American Center of Research, where she has been an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellow (2015 – 2016) and ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellow (2022 – 2023). Her academic work has been published by Sage, Brill, and Oxford University Presses.

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Hidden below an urban façade but nevertheless essential for its shaping, a city’s trash was routinely used in construction processes across the Roman world. Before that occurred, both established and ad hoc frameworks dictated the lifecycles of urban waste, from its initial discard, through its sorting and storage, to its reclamation by or even resale to builders. The management process thus created an economy of refuse in Roman cities, one that was directly tied to the urban construction industry. Working in tandem, these industries transformed a city over time, from its subterranean foundations to the walls that bounded Roman daily life. 

The recycling of refuse in Petra, the capital of the Nabataeans (Fig. 1), was an especially critical element in the building process in the long century before the Roman annexation of the Nabataean Kingdom. Many of Petra’s most famous monuments were constructed at the end of the 1^st century BCE and the start of the 1^st century CE, likely during the reign of Aretas IV (r. ca. 9 BCE–40 CE). These structures include but are not limited to the so-called Great Temple, the connected Garden and Pool complex, Qasr al-Bint, the Temple of the Winged Lions, and likely the theater. But the city continued to grow, and rapidly so, over the rest of the century. Surveys of Umm Rattam, Jabal Ash-Shara, Jabal Haroun, Wadi Silaysil, Wadi Musa, and Udhurh, among others, have found that sites dating to the second half of the 1^st century CE dominated all others. As surveys and excavations continue, it only becomes more and more evident that Petra’s population exploded in the 1^st century CE, spilling out into any hinterland space available. 

During that period of rapid hinterland expansion, several new structures were erected on Petra’s North Ridge, overlooking the city center, including two sub-elite domestic complexes and a villa urbana, complete with a bathhouse (Fig. 2). These structures were made not just of stone but also refuse. When discarded ceramics were mixed with soils, the conglomerate could be used to raise the floor level or make the floor itself. 

The question then is, where did the refuse come from if the structures represent some of the earliest occupation in that area of the city? Before the Nabataeans lived on the North Ridge, they interred their dead there. Tombs were cut several meters down into the bedrock and opened into a chamber where numerous individuals could be buried. Families buried their kin in such tombs for generations, moving the decomposed bodies to the side to inter new family members. During and between burials, the living mourned the dead, dining both in the tombs themselves and on flattened surfaces by tomb entrances. And each ritual dining episode produced significant amounts of ceramic refuse. As excavation has shown that just five of the rock-cut shaft tombs on the North Ridge were used to burry over 120 individuals, the refuse produced from the decades of dining with the dead in and around all the tombs that honeycomb the North Ridge must have been immense. Based on the similarities between the dining refuse and the materials used to create the domestic structures’ floors and leveling fills, the builders must have recycled the ritual debris that then littered the North Ridge. As competition for building resources was especially high at this time in the mid 1^st century CE, when Petra’s residents were building in any open area they could find, builders turned to whatever materials were available, even if the materials were scattered across the surface and likely difficult to collect. 

A few decades after the Nabataean houses were built, residents renovated several units. Unlike the earlier floors that seemingly recycled ritual debris, the new floors, installed in the late 1^st or early 2^nd century CE, contained materials that were more typically associated with domestic life: cooking vessels, food remains, and storage and serving equipment. In the decades between the original construction activities and those at the turn of the century, Petra’s residents produced ever more refuse that they likely stored in a convenient location near to their home but out of the way of traffic. These dump piles did not grow exponentially, however, as they were seemingly recycled in building fills nearly as quickly as they were produced. Only one Nabataean-period dump has been identified in Petra at this point, and archaeologists are split as to whether it truly dates to the Nabataean period or if, instead, it represents clearing activity after the Roman annexation. Based on the dearth of Nabataean dumps and the prevalence of Nabataean building and rebuilding over the 1^st century and into the 2^nd century, we can argue that refuse had the potential to be a resource, and a valuable one at that, during periods of urban growth.

But just as cities were not always in periods of growth, the value of refuse did not remain stable over time. Building initially resumed in the decades following the Roman annexation, but the construction industry slumped later in the 2^nd and through the 3^rd century CE. Many of Petra’s Nabataean-period monuments fell out of use during that time, as did several of the houses on the North Ridge and elsewhere in the city. What do appear to have grown, however, were the urban dumps. On the North Ridge alone, excavation recovered approximately 40 cubic meters of domestic and industrial waste piled against the city wall and another approximately 20 cubic meters of domestic debris dumped into just one of the now out-of-use rock-cut shaft tombs. As there was no building on the North Ridge during the Roman period, and building was generally decreased elsewhere in the city, the industry that previously consumed the materials in great quantities had little use for it. As a result, it grew in increasing amounts until residents moved away entirely. 

Based on the trends in one area of the city, refuse could be a hinderance in periods of low building activity or a valuable resource in times of urban growth. Questions still remain, though. Did Nabataean builders prefer certain sources or types of refuse? Was ease of access, to other building materials but also debris deposits, a factor? Is it possible to discern how long discarded materials remained exposed to the elements before they were recycled in fills? Did the builders of elite structures consume urban refuse in similar quantities as builders of sub-elite structures did? To answer these questions, I have begun to look at other archaeological contexts, including the Petra Garden and Pool Complex, the Upper Market, surveys of Petra’s hinterland, the Byzantine period structures in Bayda, the bathhouse and Nabataean dump at Humayma, and the Nabataean caravanserai and Roman fort at Khirbet al-Khalde. With these additional datasets, we can better articulate the complex but invisible urban system that produced, managed, and consumed urban refuse within the Nabataean kingdom. 

Sarah Wenner holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati in classical archaeology; her dissertation examined the role of discarded materials in shaping urban spaces throughout the Roman empire, with case studies from Petra, Pompeii, and Segedunum (UK). She has worked on many Roman sites and projects in Jordan, including Petra, Udhruh, Wadi Ramm, and Aqaba, and is assistant director of the Petra Garden and Pool Complex excavation, ceramicist for the Khirbet al-Khalde project, and co-editor of the Petra North Ridge Project’s final report. Wenner’s ACOR NEH Fellowship (2023–2024) project, South Jordan Ceramics as a Lens to Site Formation Processes, expands on her dissertation research for her first book project, which considers how southern Jordan’s ancient ceramic tradition contributed to the site formation processes of Petra and surrounding sites from the 1st century BCE through the 5th century CE.

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Romani people in Jordan, by some estimates, are as numerous as 70,000. Present in the Arab region in some capacity since the 8th century, Romani characters appear recurrently in literary works by luminous authors from the early centuries of Islam and into the medieval period, including al-Jahiz, al-Harriri, Ibn al-Muqaffa’, and Ibn Daniyal. Romanies appear prominently in Orientalist travelogues in the early part of the 20^th century, as well as in works by Arab authors. For Mahmoud Darwish, often considered to be the greatest modern Arab poet, the figure of the landless, wandering Romani became a metaphor by which to romanticize the Palestinian refugee crisis. He wrote in a famous poem, “Violins weep with Romanies going to Andalusia / Violins weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia.”

In Jordan, Romanies were a favorite theme of Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal (also known by his pen name, “Arar”), the early 20^th-century poet and one of the architects of Jordanian identity. Prone to raucous depictions of revelry evoking the medieval Sufi poets (but without their spiritual double entendres), Arar would often write of his benders in Romani tent encampments around his home city of Irbid which was then a small town. Like his Andalusian contemporary Federico García Lorca, Arar found in Romani people a romanticized purity: a discursive site from which to critique modernity and what he thought to be its hypocrisies. Arar’s son, Wasfi Al-Tal, who became a prominent Jordanian political figure, was also an early patron of Abdo Musa, a Romani rabab master and singer who was arguably the first authentically Jordanian musical voice. In the 1980s, the Romani bouzouk player Jamil Al-Aas, along with his wife, Salwa Haddad, popularized what is today one of the most widely loved folk songs in Arabic: “Wen a’ Ramallah.” The song is Palestinian and its performers Palestinian/Jordanian, but what is not popularly known is that it is most likely of Romani origins, as Romanies themselves attest; it is an invocation of a bygone era of Romani wandering through Palestine and the Levantine region. 

Yet, in spite of this continuity of an over a millennia-long presence and cultural contributions, Romanies remain strangers to mainstream Jordanian consciousness. I have made theoretical arguments elsewhere on possible reasons for such an omission, so I will not repeat these arguments here. Rather, for the remainder of this essay, I will offer a basic ethnological sketch of the various Romani groups in Jordan.

For a start, the ethnonym “Romani” is a polite umbrella term for referring to an array of groups that are related by language, history, or sometimes mere affinity (more on this shortly). In English, the better-known term is “Gypsy;” but that is an uncomfortable lexical choice that carries with it centuries of racism and abuse. In Arabic, the literary term is al-ghajar, but the more colloquial ethnonym in the Levantine region is al-nawar; a situation that corresponds to the Romani/Gypsy divide in English. Because of how and what demographic data are collected in Jordan, it is impossible to have a detailed quantitative discussion of Romani life in the country. The population estimate of 70,000 cited earlier was reported to me by one Fateh Abdo Musa, a Romani politician (and son of musician Abdo Musa) who has for many years attempted to form a unified Romani political bloc and who has run unsuccessfully for a seat in the Jordanian parliament several times. In reality, the total number of Romanies in Jordan is unknown; it could be possibly lower, or quite plausibly much higher.

Even less known are the population dynamics of Romani sub-groups, clans, and tribes. This is, again, mostly because of the reluctance of the Jordanian government to collect ethnicized data. But there is another problem here. Romanies in Jordan are indicative of a much wider tendency in Arab/Islamic society that historically feigned ambiguity in various areas of life that later underwent examinations of scientific exactitude in the 20^th century. Some such areas, argues the Arabist Thomas Bauer, included sexuality, Qur’anic interpretation, linguistics, religious skepticism, and more. The move away from ambiguity and toward standardized categories (and consequent intolerances), argues the Bauer, has largely been a result of the interventions of European powers that were for centuries engulfed by the Catholic dogma of un roi, une loi, une foi. I argue in my upcoming book on Romani kinship in Palestine that ethnic groups and boundaries were also historically ambiguous in the region and that presently ambiguous Romani formations are a relic of this premodern past. This being said, the two main Romani groups in Jordan are Doms and Turkmen, although each one is then subdivided into various groups, some of which often overlap with non-Romani lineages.

Doms are the largest Romani group in the Middle East (Fig. 1). Dom is a cognate term with rom; both terms for “man” in Domari and Romani languages, respectively—the former being the language of Doms, and the latter the language family of European Roma. Thus, there is a clear linguistic connection between Doms and Romani peoples of Europe. Domari is largely no longer spoken in Jordan, with the exception of the Daqdaqa tribe of Doms (Fig. 2). The name of this Dom tribe most likely refers to the Arabic daq “tattoo,” a prominent feature in the culture of this group. Most Doms in Jordan are refugees from Palestine, although very few use such language themselves to describe their fortunes. Having arrived in the thousands with the Palestinian exoduses of 1948 and 1967, Doms, in this sense, constitute an integral part of the Palestinian story in Jordan.

A second Romani group that is prominent in Jordan is the Turkmen, a Turkish-speaking group with likely neither linguistic nor ethnic ties to other Romani peoples (Fig. 3). However, the consensus in the scholarly field of Romani studies is that Romani identity is bound not only by shared ethnicity but also by affinity, and the situation in Jordan shows that Turkmen and Daqdaqa Doms settle in the same neighborhoods whenever possible. Although sometimes professing their distinction from one another, the two also cooperate on practical matters: conflict resolution, wedding celebrations, and political life. That is to say, Doms are always invited to Turkmen weddings and vice versa, members of one group will turn to the other group’s sheikhs when there is a conflict in the community, and both are represented in Jordanian politics by Fateh Abdo Musa.Most importantly, perhaps, both Doms and Turkmen (with the exception of Doms from Gaza) are Jordanian citizens, meaning that these populous communities with a historic continuity in the region constitute part of the Jordanian political body and are also part and parcel of the human index of what we call varyingly and at various strata as the bilad al-sham or the Levant, the Arab world, and the Middle East.

Arpan Roy was the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at the American Center of Research for 2022–2023. He is an incoming Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2021. His book manuscript, tentatively titled Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference, is currently under review with the University of Toronto Press. He is also co-editing the first book project of Insaniyyat, the society of Palestinian anthropologists. He has published articles in Anthropological Theory, CITY, Social Anthropology, and Jerusalem Quarterly. 

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Material culture provides a glimpse into the important objects that people created, exchanged, and carried with them for functional and symbolic purposes. The study of archaeology requires a suite of specializations and perspectives, but material culture remains a fundamental source of information. In his pioneering volume In Small Things Forgotten (1977), James Deetz argued that seemingly small and insignificant objects capture a fundamental part of our existence. Although primarily interested in North American historical archaeology, Deetz emphasized the need to understand artifacts as more than just typological entries. For the people living and visiting the landscape of the Black Desert in Jordan, the rich material culture was not solely for the functional purposes of survival but evoked connections with other people, places, and meanings. 

Climatic conditions in the southern Levant during the 9^th and 8^th millennia BCE created environments in which increased cereal and pulse farming, and animal husbandry, fostered population growth and higher-density settlements. By the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (c. 7500–7000 BCE), larger settlements emerged in the region from southern Jordan to southern Syria. Some of these villages were abandoned around 7000 BCE while others suffered a depleted population. In contrast to the well-known fundamental changes that occurred across southwestern Asia during the early Neolithic, the subsequent Late Neolithic (LN) is poorly documented and was once considered a “hiatus” in the southern Levant. Even less well understood, the marginal steppes and deserts outside the “Fertile Crescent” were often viewed as underpopulated and of little significance to the larger neolithization process. Until recently, few structures were known in the steppes and desert to the east dating to the 8^th to 6^th millennium BCE. These “small things remembered” provide another glimpse into what was once thought to be a hiatus. 

Since 2009, the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project (EBAP) has examined two areas, Wisad Pools and the mesas along Wadi al-Qattafi (Fig. 1). Both are located on the margins of the harra, the volcanic Black Desert of Jordan. These sites were used intensively by prehistoric hunters and herders from the early 7^th to mid-6^th millennium BCE. Based on the many substantial, well-built Late Neolithic structures and the botanical evidence for trees (oak, willow, acacia) and marshy plants, mounting lines of evidence paint a picture very different from that of the bleak and desolate desert we see today. Rather than brief, temporary visits of small groups of people passing through, we now believe that people built and occupied substantial structures organized into hamlets, spending much of the year hunting and herding. Many questions remain, of course: where did these people come from? We know that they were hunting gazelle, onager (wild donkey), hare, and a few other animals, but to what degree did herding of domesticated animals play a role? Did the escalation in gazelle hunting with animal traps (“desert kites”) increase the role of hunting in exchange across the region? 

Wadi al-Qattafi is a major drainage basin about 60 kilometers east of Azraq where a series of about 30 basalt-capped mesas loom 40–60 meters over the desert floor. Various collapsed structures found atop the mesas and along their lower slopes include animal pens, tower tombs, desert kites, and cells. The EBAP team excavated four structures along Wadi al-Qattafi; two are small huts atop Maitland’s Mesa (Mesa 4; Fig. 2) that provided no artifacts or carbonized remains. In the other two structures were found arrowheads, beads, animal bones, and various small finds dating to the Late Neolithic, although these finds were possibly separated by as much seven to eight centuries. Sixty kilometers farther to the east, the extensive site of Wisad Pools includes over 500 ancient structures concentrated around a series of about nine pools. Three structures excavated over the past decade date to the Late Neolithic, with some structures built in the earliest stages of the this period. In addition to the variety of structures around the pools, over 400 petroglyphs are pecked into the basalt, primarily depicting horned animals (such as ibex, kudu, and cattle), camels, and desert kites (Hill et al. 2020). 

In the decade since the EBAP was established, our understanding of the recently defined Black Desert Late Neolithic (Wasse et al. 2020) has been transformed. The multi-faceted and far-reaching changes documented at Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi during the later 7^th and earlier 6^th millennia cal. BCE seem to be part of wider, regional transformative processes playing out concurrently along the arc of the upper Mesopotamian and Levantine desert line. Emerging evidence suggests that sites such as Wisad Pools and Wadi al-Qattafi, as crossroads on the steppe, played important roles as hubs of cultural exchange between disparate regions during the Late Neolithic period. Long-distance contacts may have formed an essential component in interregional networks that are largely unexamined for the later prehistoric periods in the southern Levant, particularly during the Late Neolithic period. 

To study this potential nexus of interconnected spheres, a critical component is the analysis of the small finds collected from the excavations of these five Late Neolithic structures. Chipped stone and animal bone constitute most finds, but the stone and shell beads, palettes, rings or bracelets, ochre, shells, and other small objects signify important elements of personal identity, status, and connectivity. By identifying the material type, potential origins of material, documentation of form and metrics, and parallel types from roughly contemporaneous sites, a database for comparative study with the wider Neolithic world will be established. Most non-flint small finds are beads manufactured from a variety of materials such as limestone (Fig. 3), bone, Dabba marble (Fig. 4), and carnelian. While limestone and bone probably originated locally, Dabba marble derives from farther away, perhaps to the southwest, near Wadi Jilat. Carnelian sources are not well known and be in the south, in Saudi Arabia, or even farther away. 

Other unusual objects hint at connections with more distant lands, such as the incised cone (Fig. 5) and the large mother-of-pearl plaque (Fig. 6). The shape of the incomplete incised cone is reminiscent of Mesopotamian tokens, commonly made of ceramic, the function of which continues to be debated. Secreted inside of a reconfigured doorway, the mother of pearl originates far from the Black Desert and must have been a prized possession. Another intriguing artifact is the labret, made of hard gray stone, an item thought to decorate either the lower lip or the ear (Fig. 7). Known from Mesopotamian contexts, the labret hints at connections to the east or northeast. The study of small things remembered contributes to a reconsideration of the putative lacuna of occupation in the region.

References

Deez, J. 1977. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Hill, A. C., and Y. M. Rowan. 2022. “The Black Desert Drone Survey: New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape.” Remote Sensing 14(3) [special issue: Jesse Casana and Elise Jakoby Laugier (eds.), Remote Sensing of Past Human Land Use]: 18 pp. DOI: 10.3390/rs14030702.

Wasse, A., G. O. Rollefson, and Y. M. Rowan. 2020. “Flamingos in the Desert: How a Chance Encounter Shed Light on the ‘Burin Neolithic’ of Eastern Jordan.” In P. M. M. G. Akkermans (ed.), Landscapes of Survival: Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan’s Black Desert, 79–101. Leiden: Sidestone Press. 

Yorke Rowan, ACOR NEH Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2022–2023, is an anthropological archaeologist and research associate professor at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum (formerly the Oriental Institute) of the University of Chicago. He focuses on later prehistory (Late Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze), with thematic research interests in death, prehistoric ritual performance, and material objects mediating these human actions. His most recent publications include The Social Archaeology of the Levant: From Prehistory to Present (2019, Cambridge University Press, co-edited with A. Yasur-Landau and E. Cline) and “The Black Desert Drone Survey: New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape” in the journal Remote Sensing (2022) with A. C. Hill. He co-directs the Kites in Context Project and the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project, both in the Black Desert of Jordan.

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The Roman Empire was one of many ancient civilizations that understood the necessity of a water supply system, and they became experts in building large aqueducts and urban water systems. They, along with the Greeks, spread new cultural institutions that required water to be used in ways that went beyond the communal needs of the city, such as fountains and bath houses. However, the function and form of these new water supply systems depended on their regional context and could indicate significant cultural changes. My research project at the American Center of Research is part of a larger endeavor, which is to better understand how water was used in Roman cities, especially in provinces distant from the capital at Rome.

I chose to study water because water infrastructure is an overlooked data set in ancient cities. Scholars typically look at artistic and ceramic remains to assess questions of social development. When hydrology is considered, scholarly attention is given to the engineering and architectural aspects of aqueduct construction, ignoring how and why water was utilized and consumed by the inhabitants of the city. My project aims to address an understudied region within water studies and encourage a deeper discussion on the influence of cultural and social diversity on water consumption in the Roman Empire.

My research focuses on several cities within a micro-region of the Roman Empire called the Decapolis (Fig. 1). The Decapolis was a geographic region within the Near East consisting of a loosely grouped collection of ten city-states that emerged in the Hellenistic period and continued to identify together in the Roman period. The ten cities of the Decapolis are located in present-day Jordan, Israel, and Syria. For my dissertation and American Center project, I analyzed four of these cities, all located in northern Jordan: Jerash, Umm Qais, Amman, and Pella. I chose this region and these cities because they provide a unique atmosphere to study waterscapes. They share many similar characteristics of urban planning and investment in Greco-Roman architecture but are topographically diverse. Jerash and Umm Qais are the best-preserved sites, boasting complex aqueducts and water installations. I am using these two cities as my type sites from which to compare two others that are less well preserved: Amman and Pella. Thanks to funding I received from the American Center, I was able to visit these archaeological sites and document water supply features such as pipes, non-ornamental fountains, and water channels. 

The first part of my stay at the center was spent visiting archaeological sites relevant to my dissertation and collecting data from existing archaeological remains. Hydrological features are not always included in site plans and excavation reports, so it was important that I visit each in person. My study visits included basic documentation, such as taking photographs of in-situ archaeological features, recording basic measurements, and noting elevations of these features. 

The first site I visited was Amman, known as Philadelphia in the Roman period. I visited the Citadel (Al-Qal’a) (Fig. 2) and the Roman buildings downtown. At the Citadel, I analyzed the cisterns and wells that are thought to date to the Umayyad period. The Umayyad palace is, in fact, on top of an earlier Roman monumental structure, so the cisterns and wells of the palace could have been part of a previous Roman enclosure. I also studied the area around the Roman theater and the nymphaeum. It seems that the main water supply was focused in this area during the Roman period and was directly connected to the wadi. 

Jerash is a massive site, about 80 hectares in size, which is almost 112 soccer fields! My favorite monument was the Temple of Zeus, which was built on a large hill overlooking the site. It has a spectacular view of the oval plaza and the colonnaded street (Fig. 3). At Jerash, I spent several days visiting the site and walking around the remains, identifying water installations. I found several street fountains along the main colonnaded street, as well as evidence of water supply on the other side streets. I also documented reservoirs and cisterns from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. Additionally, I took elevations and analyzed potential water-supply routes.

Pella, also known as Tabaqat Fahl, is located northeast of Jerash, near the junction of the highlands and the Jordan Valley. When I first arrived at the site, I thought it was at a very high altitude overlooking the valley, but when I checked my elevation, I was actually below sea level! The site is famous for its Byzantine churches (Fig. 4) and Iron Age temples. The Roman material is below the Byzantine layers and very hard to excavate because the water table is so high. I was hoping that my observations from the other sites would help me to identify water features at Pella, but the only one I could identify is the already-excavated exedra (seating area), likely part of a bath, and the vaulted structure next to it. The Roman period will continue to remain a mystery here for now.

Umm Qais, also known as ancient Gadara, is an amazing site located in the northwest corner of Jordan. On a clear day, from here you can see the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights in the distance. The long colonnaded street has been excavated, but no street fountains other than the monumental nymphaeum have been identified yet (Fig. 5). However, I found several potential fountains that all had architecture similar to the other Roman monuments and had evidence of plastering. 

I spent most of the second part of my stay at the American Center of Research creating a database of all the hydrological data I had collected during my site visits. Additionally, I spent time in the library sifting through old excavation reports and books to which I had had no prior access. My fellowship has also allowed me to travel to other cultural heritage sites in Jordan. For instance, I got to visit Ajloun Castle, Madaba, Umm ar-Rasas, the Dead Sea, Petra, Wadi Rum, and Aqaba. Visiting Petra had a great impact on my research perspective and allowed me a means to compare how other cultures were supplying water in a different region. The aqueduct channel carved into the rockface of the Siq attests to the fact that region, topography, and access to water directly affect how water will be supplied and used.  

Jordan is a truly wonderful place, full of rich cultural heritage, and I am lucky that I was able to fully immerse myself in its traditions. 

References

Lichtenberger Achim and Rubina Raja. 2018. The Archaeology and History of Jerash: 110 Years of Excavations. Turnhout: Brepols.

Northedge, Alastair. 1992. Studies on Roman and Islamic Amman: The Excavations of Mrs. C-M Bennet and Other Investigations, volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Robert Houston, and Leslie Preston Day. 1989. Pella of the Decapolis, volume 2: Final Report on the College of Wooster Excavations in Area IX, The Civic Complex, 1979–1985. [Wooster, Ohio]: The College of Wooster.

Clare Rasmussen is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. She holds a BA in anthropology and classical archaeology from the University of Michigan and a MA in classics from the University of Arizona. She is primarily interested in Roman archaeology with a particular focus on water studies, city planning, architecture, landscape, and cultural identity. While she is a resident at the American Center of Research, Clare will be working on her PhD dissertation project, “Water Consumption in the Decapolis: Examining Water Use in Gerasa, Philadelphia, Gadara, and Pella during the Roman Period.” Her dissertation aims to explore the social, cultural, and religious implications of water-supply systems in select cities of the historical Decapolis region of northern Jordan in order to understand how and why local inhabitants adapted, adopted, and modified hydrological structures into the urban armature of their cities. Her project seeks to address an understudied region within Roman water studies, encourage a deeper discussion on the influence of cultural and social diversity on water consumption, and examine the widespread perception of homogenous water consumption in the Roman Empire.

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Rural life in Jordan during the Ottoman period is a topic that has received little attention from archaeologists. While there is a rich corpus of historical writings on the late Ottoman period due to the Tanzimat reforms, archaeological literature on the subject remains scant. Any tour across the landscape of Jordan will reveal remains of the Ottoman period, the most obvious being the Ottoman hajj forts (Fig. 1), many of which were constructed or reconstructed during the early Ottoman period. Less conspicuous are the remains of villages, which are usually located within or near modern villages (Fig. 2). Sometimes they are majestically poised on tops of hills, or along the slopes of wadis, hidden from view. Approaching them from afar is a special experience: sometimes they blend into their surroundings well, being constructed of local limestone and nari (calcrete/caliche), but just as often they feature local basalt in the construction, making them a striking image in the landscape. In other cases, the modern villages have grown around the old Ottoman-period structures (for example, Fig. 3), which were often themselves built on earlier remains. Many of these villages were occupied for centuries and thus hold special historical value to Jordan, although they are often overlooked for scientific study in favor of ancient sites.

Popular discourse has it that archaeological sites of the later periods do not hold the same romantic associations and mystery that those of the ancient periods do, and this has unfortunately led to their being forgotten, by locals and academics alike. Although the late medieval/early modern periods have not often been considered with a great deal of seriousness by archaeologists, this is slowly changing, as the inherent value that these villages have to our archaeological knowledge is beginning to be understood. These multi-period sites are valuable not only because they have earlier occupation levels; it should be made abundantly clear that the current hierarchical perception of time periods in the field of archaeology is an archaic viewpoint that must be left in the past. The fact is that these villages represent continuity, a topic not often favored by academic research, as sudden changes in the archaeological record present a mystery to be solved. However, it needs to be acknowledged that continuity is what archaeology is meant to examine as well—what everyday life was like for people: not just in those moments of crisis and war, but what characterized the lives of people, most of whom fell within the social category of “peasantry” (or fellahin). Ironically, this class made up the majority of the population, yet they remain the least understood.

One of the ways that we can begin to understand the lives of the fellahin in Jordan is through the study of the villages they left behind, which are steadily disappearing. Many are currently in ruins and as of yet have not been systematically excavated. Places of the later periods in this region are often seen only for their worth in terms of cultural heritage, and while they are of course important in this respect, they also hold great value in terms of advancing our archaeological knowledge of the region. However, simply preserving them for future generations is not enough; understanding their inherent value begins with devoted academic engagement.

Ottoman archaeology is an historical archaeology, and it represents an opportunity to bridge the fields of history and archaeology, both of which have serious weaknesses in the study of this period in Jordan. In terms of historical sources, the first century of Ottoman rule in the region was fairly well recorded through tax registers and regularly conducted cadastral surveys, making their combined analysis a perfect tool for the archaeologist, who studies processes as they occur over long periods of time. Unfortunately, this practice was discontinued after this first century of rule, but this in itself reveals something important about state and local relations, indicating that state presence was ephemeral, if not completely nil. The general lack of textual data thereafter has been historically interpreted as something of a dark age in the region, where Bedouin raids and lawlessness became the norm. However, this is a gross oversimplification of the situation that does not take into account the archaeological data. What is indicated by material evidence is rather a process of ruralization, where local rulership and industries would prevail. But, as is well known, history is almost always written from the perspective of the ruling elite or by those of higher classes who were literate. A case in point are the European travel accounts that abound for the region of the “Holy Land,” where pilgrimage became popular from the 19^th century on. While many of these narratives contain useful information on the various villages and landscapes of Jordan, they must be read with great caution, given the prevailing ethnocentric viewpoints of the time.

The way of life in Greater Syria would change again with the reintroduction of direct Ottoman rule via the Tanzimat. These reforms were meant to recentralize Ottoman rule and utilize the vast agricultural potential of the region to the benefit of the state, whose treasury was pitifully empty after the many wars engaged in with Europe. The Ottomans saw Greater Syria as an economically beneficial tool, provided they could manage to organize the lands to work in their favor. In the end, the many reforms regarding land tenure were to prove unsuccessful, with their overall plan backfiring, as land was gradually collected by wealthy landowners at the expense of both the state and the peasantry.

The remains of the villages that we see today are a reflection of the prevailing situation during the late Ottoman and early (British) Mandate period. As agricultural production decreased due to the profitability of employment in manufacturing industries, people left their villages for lives in the towns and cities. However, many of these old villages are still being occupied in some form (Fig. 4)—usually as stables for animals, or as storage units, where they continue to remain an integral part of the village fabric. As such, these places are truly temporal palimpsests, the physical depictions of centuries-old processes of rural life in Jordan, with every region having its own unique characteristics and each village its own stories to tell.

Lauren Erker is a PhD student in the Islamic Archaeology Research Unit at the University of Bonn in Germany. She received her BA in anthropology from Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado, and her MSc in late antique, Byzantine, and Islamic studies from the University of Edinburgh, and she has held an ACOR-CAORC Predoctoral Fellowship (2021–2022). Having excavation and survey experience in the states of Colorado and Wyoming as well as in the countries of Oman, Israel-Palestine, and Jordan, she now works for the American Center of Research as archaeologist for the Amman Citadel project. Her dissertation is a socio-archaeological analysis of rural settlement in Palestine and Transjordan during the Ottoman period.

The post Diverging Paths: A Socio-archaeological Investigation of Rural Settlement in Ottoman Palestine and Transjordan appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

I am an emerging professional in cultural heritage, chosen by the United States Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (US/ICOMOS) to participate in their International Exchange Program (IEP), an honor that brought me to Amman for the summer of 2022. At the American Center of Research, I worked on the Prevention of Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property Project under the leadership of Dr. Ahmed Fatima Kzzo. Funded by the Office of Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Amman and in cooperation with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (DoA), this project aims to combat the illegal acquisition and destruction of antiquities in Jordan and to strengthen national and international efforts to preserve and protect cultural heritage by supporting the DoA’s anti-trafficking unit. My role was to support the initiative by drafting the outline of a training manual for DoA staff and local archaeologists to ensure the project’s sustainability, as well as by analyzing trainees’ data for periodic quarterly reports on the project, preparing designs to be used for public awareness, and undertaking other tasks.

In addition to my work at the American Center, I had the privilege of attending the Fifteenth International Conference on the History and Archaeology of Jordan (ICHAJ 15), with the theme of “Thoughtful Archaeology in the Ecosphere and Sociosphere,” at Yarmouk University. This was the second time I was fortunate enough to visit Irbid, the first being when I visited the Dar As-Saraya Museum for a training program related to the Prevention of Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property Project.

The conference was inaugurated by HRH Prince Hassan, who delivered an engaging and thoughtful speech about Jordanian cultural heritage. Prince Hassan, a longtime supporter of archaeology and protecting Jordan’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage, made an effort to engage with a variety of presenters during his speech. Over three days, ICHAJ had at least a hundred presentations, five multi-hour workshops, eleven online lectures, and a poster session. Topics discussed included conservation and community participation, capacity-building for sustainable preservation, the fight against illicit cultural-heritage trafficking, and more. I was very appreciative of the conference’s focus on accessibility, as every session was translated into both Arabic and English. This feature fostered a welcoming atmosphere, overcoming the typical issues of language barriers at international conferences.

The lectures provided great insight into the latest research in Jordan. Of particular interest to me, Dr. Helen Malko (associate director for fellowships and programs) and Dr. Ahmed Kzzo (director of the Prevention of Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property Project) presented the American Center’s illicit-trafficking prevention project on the second day of the conference. It was incredibly special for me to witness research I had participated in crafting presented at an international conference. I also greatly enjoyed hearing from scholars such as Dr. Craig A. Harvey (a former American Center fellow), who presented on Roman marble sculptural fragments found at the site of Humayma. Beyond individual lectures, I attended a two-hour workshop on the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP) hosted at the Museum of Jordanian Heritage at Yarmouk University. The workshop was moderated by Douglas R. Clark, who, along with fellow team members Suzanne Richard and Basem Mahamid, provided an overview of the progression and projections of their exciting project. Additionally, the American Center’s own Jehad Haron (associate director and cultural-heritage resources development lead for its USAID-funded Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project) joined the workshop to present his forthcoming book, a manual about the pottery of Jordan.

To conclude each day of the conference, ICHAJ staff organized fantastic group excursions to archaeological sites near Irbid. In Jerash, I had the privilege to dine with HE Dr. Nayef Himiedi Al Fayez, the minister of tourism and antiquities, and Prof. Fadi Al Balawi, director general of the Department of Antiquities. We traveled to Umm Qais on Thursday evening and dined within the site. I felt very privileged to see the ancient city of Gadara at sunset and take in the view of the Sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights, and the surrounding states. ICHAJ 15 came to a close with a gala dinner at the Amman Citadel (Fig. 2). We genuinely had a red carpet rolled out for us as we walked into dinner serenaded by bagpipes. It was a regal conclusion to an enlightening conference, and I was grateful to be among the international cohort of voices vowing to protect Jordanian history and archaeology.

My welcoming experience at ICHAJ mirrored my time at the American Center. The newly renovated building was pristine, especially the outdoor patios, library, and gym. However, the most significant takeaway from my time at the center has been the network I have crafted here. Having an international cohort of voices to run ideas by, discuss trends among, and share experiences with as foreign scholars was the single most impactful aspect of my time in Jordan. Going forward, these relationships will continue to bolster my understanding of the cultural heritage space and how we safeguard our interwoven histories. I am so thankful that I got to experience living and working in a research center and for the colleagues I met and friendships I made while at the American Center of Research. 

Danielle Wolfson is the administrative coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communications. She is a cultural heritage specialist with experience in Germany, Greece, and now Jordan. Creating her own major in museum studies, she earned her BA from Drexel University in 2020. Her current research looks at analyzing museums as institutions for social change and current provenance standards.

The post ICHAJ 15 and the Value of International Collaboration in Cultural Heritage appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

I have been in Jordan for two months now, and Tom Parker’s presence is everywhere—in my work, in conversations with colleagues, on the stiff breeze at Petra. Despite twenty years in Near Eastern archaeology, this is my first time working in Jordan; I had just imagined he would be here when I arrived. I am an assistant professor of anthropology at North Carolina State University, where Tom worked until his unexpected death last year, and my specialty is zooarchaeology (the analysis of animal bones recovered from archaeological sites). A few years ago, Tom asked me to analyze the animal bones from the Petra North Ridge Project, which he and Megan Perry co-directed from 2012 to 2016. Tom’s initial request led, as such things often do, to my widening involvement in Jordanian zooarchaeology. Last year, Tom asked me to publish the animal bones from his Roman Aqaba Project. Around the same time, Jack Green (who was ACOR’s associate director at the time) asked me to analyze the animal bones from the Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management project. Because most of the animal bones from the Petra North Ridge, and all from the Temple of the Winged Lions project, are housed in Jordan, I applied for an ACOR fellowship to undertake those analyses. I was awarded an ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2021, and I took up the fellowship this past summer. 

What does a zooarchaeologist do? What does it mean to “analyze animal bones”? Well, it depends on the questions that we are trying to answer. I am not a zoologist; my research questions are cultural, rather than biological. I am interested in how people and animals interact and influence one another. When I study animal bones, I begin by determining what animals the bone fragments came from. Humans use horses in ways far different from how they use sheep, for example, so determining what animals the bones come from can tell us if they were animals typically used for food or as ritual sacrifices or as transportation. I also determine what body part the bone came from. If the assemblage is dominated by the small bones of the feet, for example, but lacks those from the spine and upper limbs, I might deduce that the animals were butchered at the site, but the meaty portions of the body were eaten elsewhere. I also study whether the bones came from young or old, male or female animals; that can tell us, for example, whether the people were slaughtering young males and keeping females into old age as breeding stock or for their milk. 

The vast majority of animal bones from Middle Eastern sites represent sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, dogs, horses, donkeys, and camels. Wild species such as gazelle, rabbits, deer, and onagers (Asiatic wild asses; the subspecies that lived in Jordan is extinct) are rarer, but not unexpected. So zooarchaeologists typically need to learn the skeletal anatomy of only a handful of species that predominate in a particular region. When we come across something unexpected, there are many options for figuring out what kind of animal it came from. We can look up pictures of suspected species. We can take the bone to a natural history museum and try to find a match in their skeletal collections. We can post a picture on the Zooarchaeology Listserv—a web resource where zooarchaeologists (there are, shockingly, thousands of us) share pictures and ask for help with identification. I did just that this summer. I put an image of a strange-looking bone on the listserv, and within hours several helpful colleagues had identified it as a particular kind of dwarf dog found at Roman-period sites (Fig. 1). They even sent photos. It was an exact match. 

In my two months at ACOR, I’ve studied more than 70,000 bone fragments from the Petra North Ridge and Temple of the Winged Lions projects. Most of the animals are sheep and goat, but there have been some surprises. There is now pretty clear evidence of a workshop on Petra’s North Ridge where residents were butchering camels and using their lower limb bones to fashion pins, needles, rings, plaques, and more. We find not only the tools in the bone assemblage but also the detritus of the tool production process (Fig. 2). We have two different species of dog: the dwarf variety and a longer-limbed breed. There are also a lot of fish bones—especially parrotfish, with their distinctive beaks, which would have been transported in from the Red Sea. There are still more bones to study, but I was able to examine the majority of both assemblages while at ACOR. 

But the best part about working at ACOR has been the people I’ve met. Early in my stay in Jordan, I met Lubna Omar, a zooarchaeologist who was in Amman for the month of July (Fig. 3). Lubna was looking for a new project, and I had a lot to do, so I asked her to collaborate with me on the Petra North Ridge bones. We worked together for several weeks and will publish the results jointly. The ACOR residents this summer also included a host of friends old and new, and conversations with them at lunch, on the patio, and out on the town helped alleviate the stress of recording 70,000 tiny bone fragments in a vast Excel spreadsheet. The staff were also unflaggingly kind and helpful and ensured that I had everything I needed to accomplish my research goals. I wish I could thank Tom Parker for introducing me to Jordan, ACOR, and this new network of friends and colleagues. Thanks to my time at ACOR this summer, I’m now even more prepared to answer the question that I know he would ask: No, Tom, there are still no dinosaur bones in the assemblage.

Kathryn Grossman is assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. She is an archaeologist and zooarchaeologist with expertise in the complex societies of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean. She earned her BA in archaeology from Tufts University and her MA and PhD in Near Eastern art and archaeology from the University of Chicago. Her current research focuses on resistance to state-making, the biographies of early cities, and human/non-human animal relationships in early complex societies. She directs the Makounta-Voules Archaeological Project in Cyprus and has been a senior staff member on archaeological projects in Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, and Iraq.

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I am currently a visiting professor in the Writings Program at New York University-Abu Dhabi and was an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Center of Research from March to August 2021. I arrived at the American Center in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and fresh from receiving my doctorate in Near Eastern languages and cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles. My earlier studies included an MA in 2011 from the University of Arkansas in anthropology, looking at the transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age in the Orontes Valley of Syria, and a BS in 2009 from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in archaeological studies. I have excavated and surveyed in various places across the globe, including Bolivia, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arkansas, and California. My PhD and ongoing research focus on landscapes of change and mobility during the transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age.

In its broadest sense, my research focuses on flashpoints of change from a landscape perspective. The foremost aim of my project is to address the interrelationship between Early Bronze IV (EB IV) settlement locations and environmental niches. The primary objective has been to further analyze the Early Bronze Age IV (c. 2500–2000 BCE) from multiple perspectives in the Levant. This was done from multiple theoretical perspectives, focusing predominantly on models of resilience and methodologies associated with landscape studies including geographic information systems (GIS).

Most of my time at the American Center was spent cleaning and amassing archaeological survey data for the entirety of the Levant. In total, I now have a database of over 10,000 archaeological sites that have been surveyed in the southern Levant, ranging from the Chalcolithic through the Iron Age, with an emphasis on the transitional periods. The data came from Department of Antiquities websites, as well as surveys published by various research institutions. Some of my time during this fellowship was spent creating Python scripts to strip data and put them into a manageable database and a more manipulatable form. I used open-source Python libraries to help determine some logical patterns. Once regular patterns were established, the data were converted into comma-separated-value (CSV) tables, which are readable by Microsoft Excel. These data, which included geographic locations in the form of latitude and longitude, were then input into ArcGIS to create maps and establish spatial patterns for analysis (Fig. 1).

In addition, I visited archaeological sites and regions in Jordan that I had previously been unable to. The last time I was at the American Center of Research was during the winter, which limited the places I could go. During my fellowship at the center, I visited sites particularly in the southern parts of the country along the desert highway. Throughout my research, I noted that marginal zones and areas of transition were those that experienced the most impact during times of change. I wanted to better understand what types of resources these areas could maintain and wanted to see in person where they were on the landscape. A lot of my research to that point had been done with remote sensing and by analyzing satellite imagery. However, these portray only a small part of the picture, and a more extensive understanding of the areas was necessary to further my studies. Specifically, areas that are on margins of agricultural productivity, places that receive the bare minimum for dry farming at the 200–250 mm isohyet^[1] (indicating a so-called zone of uncertainty, a region in which agriculture that relies on rainfall is possible but risky), were occupied during this transitional period.

My favorite part of the fellowship was being able to drive to viewpoints and overlook the landscape about which I was writing. It was also an excuse to visit sites outside of my time period of focus. In particular, I went to Petra (Fig. 2). Several of the sites that I have in my data set are in the Arabah Valley. I hiked up the hill to the ad Deir Monument and just sat and looked over the valley. It was one of the times I could simply think about my research without having to worry about recording every detail of a site and making sure I got all the pictures just right. Sitting on the castle walls overlooking the valley, I thought about what it would have been like to travel here in antiquity. How did people access all the various environmental niches? What did they think about going along the few paths that went through the landscape? I do not typically write about or research phenomenological experiences of the landscape, but being at such a high point makes it hard not to think about it.

It was also fun to drive around and find the few safe paths through the landscape. I got to think about the logistics of travel and population movement. It is one thing to see two disparate points on a satellite image and to logically know there are elevation differences, steep slopes, and various other geological features to confront to get from one place to another, and something very different to try to drive between those two points. Even though I write about and study the EB IV landscape, it was not until I tried to physically traverse the landscape myself that I began to understand just how difficult it would have been. It gave me a much greater appreciation for the people that I study and their resourcefulness.

^[1] On a map, a line that joins points that receive the same amount of rainfall over a certain period of time (—eds.)

Amy Karoll is a visiting professor in the Writings Program at New York University-Abu Dhabi. The University of California, Los Angeles, granted her doctoral degree in Near Eastern languages and cultures; previously, she earned a master’s in anthropology from University of Arkansas and bachelor of science in archaeological studies from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The American Center of Research awarded her an ACOR-CAORC Pre-doctoral Fellowship in 2019 and, in 2021, an NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has excavated and surveyed at sites in western Asia (Syria, Israel), South America ( Bolivia), and North America (the United States: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arkansas, and California).

The post Traversing the Landscape appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

What can ethnography contribute to our understandings of health and disability in Jordan and elsewhere? In this roundtable event, Morgen Chalmiers (University of California San Diego), Timothy Loh (MIT), and I offered provisional responses by drawing on fieldwork in Jordan and the United States while reflecting on broader research trends in the Middle East and North Africa region. Here, I (Christine Sargent, University of Colorado Denver) write primarily in the first person to recap our event and provide additional reflections.

Frameworks and landscapes

Carole McGranahan (2018, 2) describes “an ethnographic sensibility” as:

“a culturally-grounded way of both being in and seeing the world… It is all that goes without saying in terms of what is considered normative or natural, and yet it is also the very rules and proclaimed truths — about the way things are, and the way they should be — that underlie both everyday and ritual beliefs and practices.”

Building on this generative description, I’d like to suggest that ethnography can offer three significant contributions to studies on health and disability. First and foremost, ethnographic approaches work from the ground up. This means ethnography can center the perspectives and projects of diverse communities as they attempt to survive and thrive in unequal conditions of prosperity and precarity​. Second, ethnographers understand biomedicine, global health, and rehabilitative therapies as politically and historically particular institutions rather than universal truths. An ethnographic orientation focuses on the actors, practices, and technologies that enable powerful institutions to function, revealing their tangible but often surprisingly fragile day-day-day operations. It also allows us to trace how these institutions rely on and reproduce — but are not reducible to — (post)colonial relations of value and labor. Finally, ethnography embraces the messiness and multiplicity of lived experience, attending to the macro- and microstructures of power that shape how people to make their way through the world and the world makes its way through them. While biomedicine and biomedically adjacent fields are increasingly hegemonic, they remain entangled in other frameworks for understanding and feeling fundamentally human experiences of health and illness.

From the outset of our event, the timeliness of the topic weighed heavily on speakers and audience members alike. We began by mourning and honoring longtime ACOR staff member Cesar Octavo, who had succumbed to COVID-19 just days earlier, on March 15. His passing occurred during the peak of the pandemic’s second wave in Jordan, as the country grappled with then-rising infection and mortality rates. Three months later, we continue to live through the uneven ebbs and flows of a global pandemic whose impacts underscore how biological, environmental, material, social, cultural, and political dimensions of health and illness are fundamentally interconnected. Only by thinking about these categories together and recognizing how each is deeply embedded in the others can we begin to imagine effective, ethical responses to the world being remade in the pandemic’s wake. Globally and locally, exposure and vulnerability to COVID-19 reflect pre-existing racialized and classed inequities, and these familiar patterns remind us “how certain social and cultural norms around health disparities, values about differences between certain bodies and social groups, and health and welfare structures were in existence long before COVID-19” (Sangaramoorthy 2020).

ACOR’s speaker series and fellowships offer platforms for generating collaboration and criticism — across disciplines, institutions, and continents. As enduring colonial inequities shape contemporary (research) worlds, the production of knowledge and distribution of its benefits do not occur randomly or equally. All three panelists acknowledged the institutional, financial, and geographic mobilities afforded by U.S. institutional affiliations. Additionally, our positionalities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, disability) shape our everyday interactions as early-career researchers conducting fieldwork in Jordan, and they locate us in broader structures of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and “North-South” geopolitics. Attuned to these inequities, we are eager to cultivate models to build better research, where “better” means research driven by local agendas and priorities and grounded in materially transparent partnerships and exchange, rather than extraction.

Inspired by feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and collectives such as the Cite Black Women movement, I began by mapping the citational landscape that has converged around questions of health in Jordan, along with more nascent research on disability. Citations, Ahmed reminds us, work as “screening techniques,” shaping the creation of knowledge that comes to build disciplinary “canons” through inclusion and exclusion. And as Seteney Shami pointed out in her recent (May 2021) ACOR presentation, the gaps between research conducted on Jordan and research conducted in Jordan remain troubling (and index deeper questions about research for whom and by whom). Indicative of Jordan’s highly developed healthcare system and geopolitical location, research outputs dealing with health are robust; those concerning disability remain emergent. While ethnography and ethnographic methods remain less commonly cited among qualitative researchers, an array of methodological companions, such as “critical phenomenology” and “interpretive phenomenology,” appear increasingly popular (Bawadi and Al-Hamdan 2017; Obeidat and Lally 2014; Nabolsi and Carson 2011; Nazzal and AL-Rawajfah 2018). Ethnography’s muted presence in an otherwise dynamic qualitative landscape invites further opportunities for discussion and collaboration. Beyond conventional academic publications, however, multimedia, open-access, and bilingual outlets including Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research, Eib (part of the Sowt podcast platform), and 7iber bring ethnographic commitments and methods to their explorations of health and disability. These platforms mobilize ethnography’s most transgressive and generative qualities, centering the expertise of local knowledge makers while refusing to be limited by academic paywalls.

Building from fieldwork

We began our individual presentations with doctoral candidate Morgen Chalmiers, a feminist ethnographer and physician in training who has been conducting multi-sited fieldwork on Syrian refugee women’s reproductive experiences in San Diego and Amman. In her work, Chalmiers brings together the paradigms of reproductive justice and critical refugee studies. As articulated by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice centers the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Key for Chalmiers’s work is putting this framework in conversation with the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective defines the latter as “a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement.” Accompanying Syrian refugees seeking reproductive healthcare, Chalmiers is studying clinical interactions — in the U.S. and Jordan — “as sites where macrosocial structures of power, privilege, and inequity are manifest, challenged, and negotiated through everyday interactions.”

Next, I offered an overview of my research on the experiences of mothers raising children with Down syndrome in greater Amman. Anthropology recognizes disability as a form of human diversity present across time and space. Ethnographic methods allow us to explore how people make sense of normative and non-normative bodyminds (Price 2015, Schalk 2018) while attending to the historical and material conditions that inform these processes. Jordan is home to dynamic and engaged disability activist and ally communities. It also boasts some of the most progressive laws in the region and was one of the first signatories to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Materializing the cultural, political, economic, and infrastructural transformations required to build an accessible and inclusive Jordan, however, remain an ongoing struggle. My fieldwork took place during a period of significant legislative development (2013–2015), but many families struggled with the gaps between progressive policy and practical implementation. I spoke with activists, advocates, educators, therapists, kin, and neighbors about the complexities of disability stigma, which continues to shape the lives of individuals with Down syndrome and their families. At the same time, I documented diverse strategies that family- and community-based organizations have developed to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about what Down syndrome is and what living with Down syndrome entails. These strategies weave together different resources, including transnational Down syndrome advocacy networks, human- and disability-rights vocabularies, Islamic and Christian visions of humanity, and biomedical or biogenetic models of heredity. Ultimately, I argue that centering disability as an analytic and dimension of lived experience can illuminate broader dynamics of change and struggle in Jordan today.

Finally, doctoral candidate Timothy Loh connected theoretical frameworks on language in medicine and disability to his dissertation research examining deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have recently emerged in the country, including the cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that provides its users with some electronic access to sound. Taking an anthropological approach to language, which emphasizes the multifunctionality of language rather than merely its capacity to describe things in the world, Loh’s research builds on recent conversations between medical and linguistic anthropologists about how language is constituted in medicine and vice versa. Loh asks how language ideologies influence the ways that medical professionals provide biomedical interventions for deaf children and how deaf people and their families engage with these technologies. The question of which technologies deaf people should use is bound up in the question of which language and languages they should learn (Friedner and Kusters 2020). In fact, Loh argued that this question takes on salience in the Middle East, a site of intense language ideologies where both scholars and the public actively debate the relationships between modern standard Arabic and colloquial dialects, indigenous languages such as Tamazight, colonial languages including French and Spanish, and English as a global language. The fact that Arabic is the both the language of the Quran as well as of the nation-state in Jordan, Loh pointed out, has implications for what languages deaf Jordanians are expected to know and to learn. 

Collectively, our research and data (re)emphasize the centrality of caregiving and care-seeking practices to projects of health and wellbeing in Jordan. We have lived through different stages of the pandemic across our different countries of residence, research, and the places we call home, raising new questions about anthropology, fieldwork, and what ethnography has to offer. We hope that our panel (and this summary) invite further discussion and new relationships that further ethnographic approaches to health and disability in Jordan and beyond.

Citations and Resources

Bawadi, H.A., and Z. Al-Hamdan. 2017. “The Cultural Beliefs of Jordanian Women during Childbearing: Implications for Nursing Care.” International Nursing Review 64 (2): 187–194.

Cite Black Women Collective.

Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

Eib. Sowt Podcasts.

Friedner, Michele and Anneliese Kusters. 2020. “Deaf Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:31–46.

Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research.

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15 (1): 1–10.

Moghnieh, Lamia, Mustafa Abdalla, Suhad Daher-Nashaf, Abdelhadi Elhalhouli. 2021.
 العيش والموت في زمن الكورونا: مقاربات من الأنثروبولوجيا الطبيّة في مجتمعات المنطقة العربيّة. Arab Council for Social Sciences.

Nabolsi, Manar M., and Alexander M. Carson. 2011. “Spirituality, Illness and Personal Responsibility: The Experience of Jordanian Muslim Men with Coronary Artery Disease.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 25 (4): 716–724.

Nazzal, Mohammad S., and Omar M. AL-Rawajfah. 2018. “Lived Experiences of Jordanian Mothers Caring for a Child with Disability.” Disability and Rehabilitation 40 (23): 2723–2733.

Obeidat, Rana F., and Robin M. Lally. 2014. “Health-Related Information Exchange Experiences of Jordanian Women at Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Journal of Cancer Education 29 (3): 548–554.

Price, Margaret. 2015. ” The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284.

Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2020. “From HIV to COVID19: Anthropology, Urgency, and the Politics of Engagement.” Somatosphere, 1 May 2020.

Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press.

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Network. “What is Reproductive Justice?”

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).”

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