Jordan Update 3

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Wesley Dowler

Reports from the Field
Northern Jordan Project 2010 Season
The al-Turra survey (June 15-28)

Following the Abraham Path tour, which took the students and staff hiking in the Ajlun hills and doing valuable work in local villages, half of our MSU team returned home to the States. The other half remained in Jordan, packing their bags and relocating to Irbid, which is the second largest city in the country and the administrative center of the North.

The Northern Jordan Project (NJP) returned to the field June 15-28, 2010 for a two-week multi-disciplinary survey in the village of al-Turra. The project was launched in 2003 with the objective of better understanding the settlement fluctuations of the Middle and Late Islamic periods in the well-watered region between Irbid and the Yarmouk River. Each season a different village has been the focus of fieldwork, which is combined with archival, ethnographic, architectural, and environmental analysis. Since its inception the Project has done surveys in Malka (2003), Hubras (2003), Saham (2006), and now al-Turra (2010), as well as excavation in Hubras (2006). The team this season consisted of 20 faculty, students, and staff from Missouri State and Yarmouk Universities, as well as two soil scientists from Erlangen University in Germany and University College in London. We were pleased to have our entire environmental team in the field with us this summer! Our team was truly international and multi-disciplinary, with specialists from the environmental sciences, ethnography, history, and geography, in addition to archaeology. The students learned important skills in surveying, mapping, and photography in the process. They also were shown considerable kindness and hospitality by the residents of the village, who brought coffee and tea and invited many of them into their homes for breaks during the work day.

The village of al-Turra is located eight kilometers north of Ramtha, its northern and north-eastern fields adjacent to the Syrian border. Traditionally part of an important grain-producing region of the southern Hawran, the gently rolling hills of al-Turra gained economic and military importance in the Mamluk period, its lands supporting religious institutions in Damascus and a tower built there as part of a system of communications on the Mamluks’ eastern frontier. Its grain fields continued to be an important source of revenue for the Ottoman state, and modern land registration began in the 1920s.

Four different walking teams did simultaneous walking surveys and mapping of the village’s western and eastern fields (and collection of surface pottery, lithics, and glass); investigations and mapping of ancient field, water, and potential road systems; architectural study of the oldest buildings in the village; and ethnographic work in the village related to land use and movements of people. In conjunction with this, specialists from the United States, Germany, and Britain did research on historical documents related to the village’s history and land use, soil and agricultural analysis, and lithics study, in an effort to isolate the factors that impact settlement and land use in the later historical periods. In terms of methods, this was the first time the NJP did a paperless survey, doing all data collection, documentation, and mapping electronically. This may be the first time this has been done in Jordan! The survey in 2010 provided evidence of occupation in the Late Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods until today, with the most intensive settlement in the Umayyad and Late Ottoman periods.

The specific goals of this summer’s brief season were to document the settlement history of the village, begin to map ways the physical village changed over time, describe land use historically, document ancient field and water and transport systems, investigate locations in the village that could possibly be the Mamluk tower and Ottoman-era garrisons described in written sources and by local residents, and identify potential locations for future excavation. All goals were met, in part or in full. The most important discoveries of the season were the identification and systematic mapping of potential road and water systems that connected the village with a much larger region in the Roman through Late Ottoman periods; documentation of settlement here in the 18th and early 19th centuries (a period when many other villages are either abandoned or in decline); and recovery of extensive ceramic imports from Italy, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria from the Renaissance and Ottoman eras. In the final days of the survey we identified ancient water and possible road systems that may have been connected in antiquity to a vast network of qanats and communications routes extending west to Abila and north through the Hawran.

A four-week excavation season with soil analysis is planned in the village in 2010, potentially to further investigate transport and water systems, in order to clarify the relationships of al-Turra with the imperial states of the medieval and post-medieval periods and with other villages in northern Jordan and the greater Hawran.

Although our field season with the NJP was brief this season, we did pack in four academic lectures by project staff and two days of tours. The lectures were designed to introduce students to the multi-disciplinary structure of the project and describe how the various components of the four survey teams worked together. They included presentations by Ms. Sophia Laparidou (University of College London, UK) on phytolith analysis; Prof. David Byers (Missouri State) on faunal research from New World contexts; Prof. Bernhard Lucke (University of Erlangen, Germany) on soil genesis and erosion studies; and Prof. Mohammed Shunnaq (Yarmouk University) on ethnography, site development, and community outreach. The weekend tours included visits to the Roman and Decapolis cities at Umm Qeis (Gadara) and Umm al-Jimal (famous for its white camels!) and so-called Early Islamic “desert castles” at Qasr Kharana, Qusayr ‘Amra, and Qasr Azraq. When the projects close on Monday, team members will have the chance to travel to places of their personal interest before returning home after a full six weeks in Jordan.

On two final notes, it actually rained this morning – a very strange summer, indeed! We should add, too, that our project was in the local news last week. We’ll add the headline to this blog site shortly.

Report submitted by Prof. Bethany J. Walker,
Project Director
Department of History
Missouri State University

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Jordan Update 2

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Wesley Dowler

Reports from the Field
Tall Hisban 2010 Season
Week Two (Saturday, May 29, 2010)

The unseasonably cooler weather, and cloudy skies, continued this week, making for very pleasant working conditions. While in the field we were visited by two tour groups from Japan and the Czech Republic and numerous local visitors. Our season’s research objectives moved forward in all four fields, with (welcome) surprises in each.

1. Field Q – The two excavation squares here began to yield important clues about the history of construction at the entrance to the citadel. In one unit (Q.5), a series of medieval walls were uncovered above the citadel steps that appear to belong to two structures of different periods. Their relationship to the by now well-known Mamluk storeroom and southwest corner tower are being clarified. In a smaller unit (Q.8), we identified what may be the single remaining stratigraphic connection between the medieval bathhouse and Mamluk storeroom, with a possibility of confirming the hammam’s construction date.

Our staff continued research on the 1970s excavations at the ACOR library in order to relate the structures uncovered this week to those excavated 40 years ago.

2. Field M – Three excavation units in this field on the northern slope of the tell brought into more focus the pre-medieval periods of occupation of the tell. Removal of the balk between M.4 and M.5 (units excavated in previous seasons) made visible a series of walls possibly connected to either a Roman water harvesting system or an industrial-size press. Work in a new unit (M.8), the largest we are excavating this season, uncovered the walls of a large building extending down the slope of the tell. (The date and function of this structure remain to be determined.) The “cave operation” in M.3 was completed this week, with the mapping and limited excavation of probes in several chambers and a cistern provided some evidence for Byzantine-era construction of walls and cisterns and reuse of the space as the medieval “town dump”.

As this field borders a modern household, we were visited frequently by members of that family, with students eventually invited in for tea.

3. Field G – Several probes in two cisterns and a passageway in this, the largest of the cave complexes at Hisban, provided provocative evidence for the formation of its systems of chambers, cisterns, built structures, and passageways. A similar sequence of Byzantine construction and medieval reuse, as in Field M, was suggested by pottery reading this week. While bedrock was reached in two units, excavation will continue in the smaller of the two cisterns, in which “clean” deposits seemed to have been reached. A new probe was also opened in mid-week in a room bordered by built arches.

4. Nabulsi qasr – This field is unique, as it is located off-site in the modern village of Hisban. Working in a modern settlement presents many challenges, requiring adaptation, creativity, and, frequently, a sense of humor! This week a village wedding in the courtyard of the qasr, which lasted the full week, forced us to relocate sifts, restring squares some mornings, and restrict our field operations until the wedding tent came down. We worked in two units inside the stable this week, in order to investigate a building of some antiquity (possibly a fort) upon which was constructed the modern stable (built right after WWII, according to local informants). Although there was a considerable amount of modern fill to remove, we appear to be coming to stratified contexts that are meaningful for understanding the earlier occupational history of this space. What we understand of these interesting village buildings at this point is that in the mid-20th century a stable was built on top of a building long in ruins, which contained a massive water facility. The cistern was then reused for grain storage. Excavation proceeded with ethnographic work in the village.

The team spends the late afternoons washing and “reading” pottery and processing artifacts each work day. I am fortunate that I am joined each afternoon at the pottery table by Micaela Sinibaldi, a Crusader ceramics specialist at Cardiff University. She has identified some wares that may be late Crusader in date, and together we have begun to piece together periods of occupational history (particularly the Crusader, Ayyubid, and Ottoman) that have been poorly understood at the site. The identification of possible Aegean and Egyptian imports for the medieval periods suggests a much wider range of contacts outside of Greater Syria than was known before.

The academic program this week focused on the “light archaeology” of the Italian schools, a technique of non-intrusive archaeology through systematic study of masonry techniques. The complicated architectural sequences of the summit of the tell, with its centuries of reuse, rebullding, and reconstruction, makes the site an ideal candidate for this technique of archaeologically adapted architectural analysis. Dr. Michele Nucciotti of the University of Florence’s Shobak mission, and a specialist in “light archaeology”, spent the week with us in the field documenting the ancient and medieval structures at the site through photography, detailed measurements, Harris matrices of masonry typology, and computerized rendering. His lecture and field demonstrations introduced the students (and staff) to this very important analytical technique. The University of Florence will be working closely with the Tall Hisban project in the future to unravel the complicated architectural (and occupational) history of the summit.

The work week ended Friday with a visit to an eco-friendly house in Amman, which may well be the vision for future sustainable development in Jordanian tourism. This house is constructed with light and recycled materials and covered with adobe and is an alternative to the concrete constructions that characterize most local building projects.

This Sunday we are touring several sites of archaeological and environmental interest in northern and central Jordan, including the Decapolis city of Jerash, the medieval castle of Ajlun, the baptismal site at Bethany-on-the-Jordan, and the Dead Sea.

Report submitted by Prof. Bethany J. Walker
Department of History
Missouri State University

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Jordan Update 1

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Wesley Dowler

Reports from the field
Tall Hisban 2010 Season
Week One (Saturday, May 22, 2010)

Our team of twenty-three Missouri State University students and faculty arrived in Amman last Sunday evening for the fifth Phase II excavation season at Tall Hisban. Located on the Madaba Plains of central Jordan, the site commands a view of the extensive grain fields of the Balqa, and on a clear day one can see Jericho and the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem to the west. This is the first season MSU joined Andrews University at Hisban for collaborative fieldwork. Together we are over fifty strong in students, faculty, staff, and workmen. This season brings to a close Phase II excavations, which began in 1996 and have focused largely on the summit of the tell. The 2010 season is a short one (only three weeks), designed as a limited excavation-study season to answer very specific questions related to site history for final publications of Phase II work.

Fieldwork began mid-morning on Monday, starting several hours later to give our team a chance to acclimatize to the time difference. In unseasonably cold weather, and fighting jetlag, we prepared four fields for excavation and introduced team members to the site through tours. The four fields offer very special challenges to our team, and the students chose where they wanted to work on the basis of the nature of the fields and the research objectives there. The four fields are:

1. Field Q – three squares on the summit of the tell, at the top of the staircase from which one enters the medieval citadel. Here we hope to document how and when the summit was militarized and transformed from sacred and domestic space. Our second research objective is to date with more confidence the bathhouse in the citadel, a structure that is a bit of an anomaly for Mamluk-era castles in this region.

2. Field M – three squares in and around the northeast corner tower of the citadel. Here we hope to better understand the ancient use of the summit, date more securely the original enclosure wall, map what appear to be industrial installations on the north slope, and better understand the extensive cavernous systems that underlies the tell.

3. Field G – the “Hardy People Cave” (a.k.a. “Abu Noor Cave”). We return this season to the largest of the cave systems at Tall Hisban, which was first investigated in 1998. Our aim is to understand the cultural and natural processes that transformed these natural caves into massive water systems and subterranean dwellings over the course of millenia.

4. Nabulsi qasr – This fortified farmhouse, originally built, we believe, in the mid-19th century, is being restored for use as an on-site museum and visitor’s center, under the direction of a newly-formed local NGO (Non-Government Orgnization). Exploratory probes this season have as their aim the elucidation of the history of one particular structure in this complex (one of the stables), which appears to have been built on and incorporated parts of a much earlier building of some antiquity.

Our work days are longish and structured. We get up at 4:30 a.m. and are in the field until noon, returning to artifact processing and pottery washing and reading at 4:00 in the afternoon. Twice a week we have our academic program, which consists of evening lectures by project faculty and staff. This week students attended lectures by Professors Øystein LaBianca (Project Senior Director, Andrews University, Michigan) and Bethany Walker (Project Co-Director and Chief Archaeologist, Missouri State University) on the community outreach and scientific objectives of this season, as well as the history of excavations at the site (which span over 40 years!). Later in the week the Andrews University Media Team presented their work on the production of a book on Hisban, with contributions by communications, film, art, and social science faculty. The lecturers demonstrated the various technologies available for the study and presentation to the public of a multi-period site such as Hisban.

The tour this weekend is a 3-day excursion to the Nabatean capital of Petra – the “rose-red city” and newest “Wonder of the World”.

The pictures in this blog were taken by our students, in the field, at camp, and on tour.

Report submitted by Prof. Bethany J. Walker
Department of History
Missouri State University