Faynan in Minecraft

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with a group of current and former University of California San Diego researchers, led by Matt Howland, to create a set of nested Sketchfab models related to the UCSD Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project excavations in the Faynan region of southern Jordan. That project is coming along nicely, and we now have several models of copper production sites, excavation areas, and artifacts linked together with descriptions, as well as professional translations of each page into Arabic.

One of the goals of this project has been to supplement traditional archaeological publication by allowing people to get a more immersive experience of what these things and places are like in person. This got me thinking about the possibility of importing the models into a video game, and since they’re mining sites, the first game that came to mind was Minecraft. Shawn Graham, who is certainly much better than I am at this sort of thing, did a series of posts about creating Minecraft maps using historical maps about a decade ago based on a New York Public Library workflow, and there are quite a few archaeological Minecraft maps on various Minecraft community sites, some of them quite good, so I figured I would give it a go. People still play Minecraft, right?

In principle, what I’m trying to do should be easier than importing historic maps into Minecraft. We already have the 3D models of the sites, including the surrounding terrain, so I don’t need to worry about creating terrain from low-resolution SRTM data, digitizing maps in GIS, etc. This, I foolishly thought, should be pretty easy.

I figured I would start with Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir, the site where I did my dissertation research. We have an OBJ model of the site, so I grabbed that and used ObjToSchematic to turn this into a Minecraft Schematic file. This went smoothly enough, but I did encounter the first of several issues here. ObjToSchematic can use the 3D model texture to select appropriately colored blocks, but it uses a wide range of Minecraft blocks as a “palette,” so the actual landscape, made up of shale hillsides and a sandy valley, gets a bit lost. It’s possible to choose a smaller selection of blocks as a palette, and this should help, but would have taken a bit more time than I wanted to dedicate to this today. The plants and archaeological features also just get created out of the same blocks, and I’m guessing this will take some work in Creative mode to fix. So, I’ll have to update as I experiment a bit more. After correcting the orientation, though, I was able to produce a passable schematic that does look, at least broadly, like the site.

From here, it seemed like the easiest approach would be to create a superflat world without any structures generated to import the model into, so I did that. Initially, I approached the import step using the Amulet editor, the successor of sorts to MCEdit, which doesn’t work on any remotely recent version of Minecraft. Amulet is easy enough to use, but after messing around with it for a few hours, I haven’t really been able to get it to do what I need to do. Initially, I was placing the schematic far up above the world. In retrospect, this probably isn’t a problem, as it would be possible to just set the world spawn there, but I wanted to have the model at ground level. I did this, but the site is essentially in a valley between two hills, so some ended up below ground level and Amulet filled this with water, which is not very accurate for Faynan. I figured the way around this would be to set everything to a desert biome, and this did work to remove the water. For a reason I haven’t been able to determine, though, the lighting is just always off on the maps I create in Amulet, and parts always end up looking pitch black regardless of where I place the schematic. I’m sure there’s a way to fix this, but I ended up trying another map editor instead.

I installed WorldEdit, which I was initially reluctant to use since it’s a Minecraft mod rather than a program in its own right, but it was simple enough to import the schematic into the world. Unlike Amulet, the lighting looks pretty normal and I was able to run around and take a look at the Minecraft version of the site.

A Minecraft archaeologist in the digital Area Z at the digital Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir.

Obviously, it still needs a lot of work before it’s useful for much of anything, but it’s still fun to see the site in Minecraft after, all things considered, not all that much work. This isn’t a primary goal of the project, but I’m still interested to get it working, so we’ll see where it goes from here.

On Don Whitcomb (1944-2024)

Almost two weeks ago, a colleague messaged me with the bad news that Donald Whitcomb had passed away. An obituary by Katia Cytryn-Silverman has since come through on the Agade mailing list. Since I heard the news, I’ve been reflecting on what Don meant for me, and for the community of Islamic archaeologists generally. I thought it would be appropriate to share some of those thoughts here.

Don was a key figure in the development of Islamic archaeology as a discipline, a scholar who was well-versed in the art historical questions that had formed its early basis but who pursued a range of questions that went far beyond this. From his early work in Iran, Don went on to direct excavations at the port of Qusayr al-Qadim in Egypt, ‘Aqaba (Early Islamic Ayla) in southern Jordan, Hadir (Early Islamic Qinnasrin) in northern Syria. and his most recent projects at Khirbat al-Mafjar in Palestine and Khirbat al-Karak/Tel Bet Yerah in northern Israel.

Naturally, Don’s work was a major influence on my own long before I actually met him. Although his project at ‘Aqaba had ended nearly 15 years before I began working in southern Jordan in 2009 (indeed, the first season of Kristoffer Damgaard’s renewed excavations at Ayla had occurred the year before), I passed the site of his excavations, Early Islamic Ayla, many times while walking along the Corniche Street on our weekends in ‘Aqaba that first season. Somewhat embarrassingly, it wasn’t until several years later that I actually went inside the site, rather than just looking in from the gate.

Large 8th century building in Ayla (‘Aqaba, Jordan) identified as the city’s Congregational Mosque by Whitcomb’s excavations in 1993.

In many ways, these excavations defined Islamic archaeology in southern Jordan. Certainly, Don was among the first archaeologists to intentionally excavate an Islamic period site in the south. Ayla, as an active port city, is, of course, not a typical site for the region. The ceramic assemblage includes glazed imports from Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, and China rarely, if ever, found elsewhere in southern Jordan. Don’s publications on the site, however, also focused on its more mundane aspects, like the simple, hand-made pottery produced there in the 10th or 11th century. Even today, ceramic reports of Islamic sites often bemoan the fact that the art historical origins of the discipline led to a focus on glazed luxury wares that has made it more difficult to understand average people (and average sites); Don’s work stands as an early corrective to this bias, and one that has since been widely adopted. From a personal perspective, Don’s approach of giving equal weight to all of these forms of evidence, from the most spectacular to the most mundane, has been an inspiration for my own work, and the Ayla excavations continue to be a critical source for helping me think through my work on Early Islamic Humayma.

Late 10th century AD Chinese glazed stoneware jar found in the Pavilion Building at Ayla. Currently on display in the Jordan Museum, ‘Amman.

It wasn’t long after this initial encounter with his work that I first met Don, the following November at the 2010 ASOR Annual Meeting in Atlanta. I was there for the first academic presentation of my graduate career, a poster based on my MA thesis. I ran into Don at the book displays, and we spoke for a few minutes. I was, of course, already familiar with his work, and I remember him not being exactly what I expected. My first impressions were of a very friendly and approachable man with formidable facial hair.

Many years later, in early 2018, I was living at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem as a pre-doctoral fellow finishing up my dissertation, and Don passed through on his way to his excavations at Khirbat al-Karak/Tel Bet Yerah. We spoke often when he was at the AIAR and it turned out my initial impressions had been correct. He was a very friendly, generous scholar, and he invited me to come up to the site and take a tour of the excavations. I did make my way up to the site, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, in the company of a few other fellows. By then, he wasn’t able to move around as well as he had when we first met, but he was still out there at the site with the assistance of a walker, happy to tell us what they were up to that day.

Khirbat al-Karak/Tel Bet Yerah on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Don and his team can be seen in the distance, excavating the Early Islamic settlement.

A few years later, I was publishing a paper that dealt, in part, with the dating of a lamp type commonly found in the south. We had excavated fragments of them in Faynan, but I was hoping to include a photo of a complete one, so I reached out to Don to ask if there were any from the excavations at Ayla. Without hesitation, Don sent photos of two and told me to feel free to use them. It seems like a small thing, but as many archaeologists can attest, it’s not something everyone would do. Certainly, it’s part of how I’ll remember Don: a towering, immensely influential figure in the field, but someone who never lost his excitement for archaeology or his generosity and willingness to help a younger scholar out. He will be greatly missed.

Some comments on global Islamic archaeology

I’ve had the pleasure, over the last two weekends, of catching the tail end of both days of the Global Islamic Archaeology Showcase, organized by Awet T. Araya and Hannah Parsons-Morgan, both affiliated with the University of Exeter’s Centre for Islamic Archaeology. (I only caught the tail end of both days because of the time difference, of course, although I would have liked to tune in for more.) The event itself was great, and I wish I’d been able to submit an abstract, but between summer teaching and some other commitments just wasn’t able to get a submission together in time. The papers I did see were very interesting, though, and covered a broad geographic and temporal span. This coverage led to a question raised for discussion at the end of the event about what to make of Islamic archaeology as a discipline spanning more than 1,000 years across multiple continents.

The two major opinions came from Hagit Nol, currently affiliated with Université libre de Bruxelles, I believe, and José C. Carvajal López of the University of Leicester. Hagit argued, to some extent, against the utility of this broad definition, pointing out that what’s really useful for most researchers tends to be more geographically and temporally constrained. She pointed out that many talks at the Showcase were very interesting, but “interesting in the same way I find talks about Denmark interesting.” I bring up that quote because it raises, perhaps unintentionally, another point about the conception of the discipline. Given the number of ‘Abbasid coins that have been found in Denmark, for example, how distinct can we consider Islamic archaeology from other Afro-Eurasian medieval/historical archaeologies? (Similar points were raised when we considered definitions of “medieval archaeology” during the Conference on Medieval Archaeology years ago.) Carvajal López took a somewhat opposed view, and argued that the difficulty separating religion from other aspects of life that have, apparently, been seen as a weakness of Islamic archaeology should be seen as an opportunity, instead. (The degree to which religion and other aspects of life can actually be easily separated in any other type of archaeology is, I think, debatable, to say the least, but that isn’t really what I want to comment on here.) In one sense, this discussion recalls previous debates over the definition of Islamic archaeology, and Islamic vs. Islamicate history before that (a terminological distinction that also came up in the discussion). For the most part, I’ve tended to adopt Marcus Milwright’s (2010) interpretation of Islamic archaeology as “a term of convenience,” but I suppose that this is a bit like defining art as “I know it when I see it.”

This got me thinking, though, about what we’re trying to do with this definition. These are mostly scattered thoughts, but I think it’s important to think through what the term is actually doing, and what we would like it to do. While a lot of new and exciting archaeology is happening that is or could be called Islamic archaeology, Islamic archaeology isn’t exactly a discipline. There are a number of centers focusing on it, mostly in Europe (the Silsila Center at NYU is the only example I can think of in the US, and I’m not sure I’d be comfortable calling its focus Islamic archaeology, exactly), and an excellent journal, but there isn’t really a professional society, a major conference, etc. In the US, there are people doing Islamic archaeology in departments of anthropology, history, art history, and NELC (also archaeology, but there aren’t many of those departments), but it’s a bit of a tough sell in any of those disciplines. Beyond that, though, this is one of a number of disciplinary identities for any archaeologist. John Cooper brought this up in his comment at the Showcase, when he pointed out that, as a maritime archaeologist, he presents at both maritime archaeology and Islamic archaeology events, realizing he’s slightly out of place at both, but I think this is true for all of us. I’m an Islamic archaeologist, but also an anthropological archaeologist, an “industrial” archaeologist, a mining archaeologist, a historical archaeologists, increasingly an environmental archaeologist, etc. I think this argues in favor of defining the field fairly broadly to include anyone who considers what they do to be “Islamic archaeology.” On the other hand, if a field is defined as scholars with shared interests and shared questions, that raises the question of what, exactly, those interests and questions are. Beyond this, though, I think there are very real questions of what our professional, rather than scholarly, identities are and can be as Islamic archaeologists. It’s important to remember that being in academia is a job, and members of our discipline have to get jobs in academic departments as they exist. It’s difficult to look at academic archaeology in the US and come to the conclusion that Islamic archaeology has been particularly successful in doing this. (I’ve certainly been told by mentors that Islamic archaeology is going to be difficult to pitch to anthropology departments, and I can confirm that this is the case.) Obviously, I don’t have a solution to this, but I think as the discipline continues to develop and grow, we need to start having more of these conversations about not only how to define Islamic archaeology, but how to make increase our visibility within the disciplines where we might actually be hired.

An Early Islamic papyrus fragment from Faynan

I promised previously that I would discuss Hannah Friedman and colleagues' paper, "Fragments of an early Islamic Arabic papyrus from Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān" — published in the same issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy as our paper on Khirbat al-Manā'iyya — in more detail. Since then I've been distracted by several projects (more on which soon eventually), but wanted to return to this paper, as their conclusions are relevant to some of the points I make about Khirbat Hamra Ifdan (KHI) in my dissertation, and the find itself is quite fascinating.

The key find discussed in the paper is, as the title suggests, a poorly preserved four line papyrus fragment with an Arabic inscription. There isn't much to say about the content of the inscription, because it's quite fragmentary, with only one complete word preserved: "Allah." (Given the content, it's worth noting that I don't find their suggestion that "it is highly probable" the author of this text was a Muslim [Friedman, et al. 2017: 291] compelling, for reasons I'll discuss below.) On paleographic grounds, they date the inscription to somewhere between the late 7th and mid-8th centuries AD. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a papyrologist, so I can't comment on their paleographic arguments, but I can comment on the archaeological context. They were working in the northern portion of KHI, to the north of the large Early Bronze Age settlement that makes up the most famous component of the site. By contrast, my work with ELRAP has concentrated on the southern portion of the site. The primary feature relevant to the discussion here is Area L, a large square structure excavated in 2000 and, unfortunately, still essentially unpublished (I'm working on it, though). It was identified at the time as a caravanserai, but I think it's more likely to be a farmhouse reusing portions of an earlier Roman tower, a point I discuss in my reevaluation of this material in my dissertation (the papyrus fragment doesn't necessarily point to one identification over the other). In Figure 1 (the image quality for this portion of Wadi Fidan in Google Earth is unfortunately rather bad), the black patch south of the red pin is Area E, a copper slag mound dating primarily to the Iron Age II, and the square structure barely visible to the north of the pin is Area L.

The Barqa Landscape Project team, in addition to the papyrus fragment, claims to have found "Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic pottery" in the northern, thinner portion of the site, although the ceramics aren't yet published and the exact location of their excavations isn't clear from the published report. The basic claim isn't surprising, though, and is consistent with what we know of the site. In our 2014 chapter we refer to a late 8th-late 9th century AD radiocarbon date from Area L — which has since been properly published in a chapter in Mining for Ancient Copper: Essays in Memory of Beno Rothenberg I'm mistaken and must apologize; we took this out of the submitted version — to which Friedman, et al. (2017: 292) refer. In addition to this, the 2000 excavations in Area L produced pottery dating to the late 8th or 9th century, and a surface collected coin likewise dates to the 8th century. This material is unpublished (but written up in my dissertation and in my publication queue), and I point it out not to critique Friedman and colleagues for not being aware of something I didn't tell them about, but rather to point out that their interpretation fits what we know from the southern portion of the site. Certainly I'm surprised to read that they found a papyrus fragment since, as they point out, papyri from this period in southern Jordan are exceedingly rare, but I'm not surprised that they found Early Islamic period material at KHI. I'm curious to read more about the context they excavated, and in particular the depth of the later occupation, however. Many of the primarily Early Bronze Age areas in the central portion of the site had fairly shallow Byzantine and Early Islamic reoccupations above, but only Area L had relatively deep Early Islamic period loci. It will be interesting to see how the northern building compares to these. (MacDonald [1992: 252] also noted slag in the northern part of the site, and while I'd love to be proven wrong on my assertion that there isn't any Early Islamic period copper smelting in Faynan, this is probably something they would have mentioned if that were the case.)

Comparison to Khirbat Faynan

Later in the paper, Friedman, et al. discuss the broader Faynan region, and particularly Khirbat Faynan, a large site in the eastern portion of the Wadi Fidan/Faynan system. Khirbat Faynan was the Roman and Byzantine town of Phaino, site of an imperial metallum, and was certainly occupied into the Early Islamic period. In general I think this discussion is sensible, but one part of it took me by surprise. On pp. 291-292, Friedman, et al. state that "Khirbat Faynān ... has never been excavated." Part of why this surprised me so much is that the citation following this statement includes "Jones et al., 2014: 184," where I make reference to the ELRAP excavations at Khirbat Faynan. In fact, as shown in Figure 2, ELRAP conducted excavations in 2011 and 2012 in three areas of the site. You can even make out the step trench we excavated in 2011 in Area 16 on the satellite imagery (the portion to the left of the "Area 16" pin is particularly easy to make out).

In fairness to Friedman and colleagues, these excavations are not as well published as they should be. I do, however, refer to them in our 2014 chapter, and the 2011 excavations are discussed in a paper in the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, a scan of which is available here. The ADAJ paper only discusses earlier occupations at Khirbat Faynan, but even without the Early Islamic area we excavated in 2012 — Area 18 — it would be incorrect to say the site had never been excavated. Nonetheless, Friedman and colleagues correctly note that the site continued to be occupied into at least the later 8th century. This is basically consistent with the dating of the Early Islamic phases in Area 18, although the latest of these contained several forms that continue into the 9th century, as well.

The Islamization of Faynan: An Early Islamic Mosque in Wadi Fidan?

I should now return to the point I brought up above concerning the religious identity of the author of the inscription, which isn't the critical point of the paper, but is the major point I disagree with. Friedman, et al. (2017: 291) point out that the content of the inscription does not actually point to an identification of the author as a Muslim. As the Arabic word for "God," "Allah" appears in Arabic Christian texts of this period (and later, of course), as well. Friedman, et al. provide some examples, to which more could certainly be added. Nonetheless, they also think it is "highly probable" that the author was a Muslim, apparently on the basis of the archaeology of the site.

What about the archaeology makes them say this? On pp. 285-286, Friedman and colleagues note that one of the authors, Russell Adams, visited the site in the mid-1980s as part of Burton MacDonald's Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey (SGNAS) and observed a structure that looked like an open-air mosque, but with its mihrab facing Jerusalem, rather than Mecca. They go on to say that when he and my advisor, Tom Levy, began excavating the site in 1999, the structure was gone. It's unclear what this structure is, as it was apparently never mapped. I would note, however, that this sounds rather like a structure visible on a map of the excavations published by Levy, et al. (2002: 434, Fig. 5A), which was assigned to site Stratum II, dating to the Early Bronze Age IV. This isn't an exact match (the "mihrab" faces slightly northeast, more or less toward Damascus, rather than Jerusalem), but it's pretty darn close, considering the reconstruction is based on memory. Friedman and colleagues, rightly, don't seem to regard this as evidence that there was a mosque on the site. It is perhaps also worth noting WFD 105, published by Levy, et al. (2001: 176, Table 2) as an Islamic period cultic site. If that identification is correct, it would also be quite odd, as that structure oriented to the west, rather than the south. (To this discussion we could also add FJHP Site 136, a structure near Petra with a niche in its eastern wall [Kouki 2013].) The discussion of whether these structures, particularly FJHP Site 136, could be mosques revolves to a large extent around the mosque or musalla built of copper slag at Be'er Ora, which seems to have niches in its eastern and southern walls, although the eastern one is less clear. I don't really want to get into this in much detail. The key facts are that this mosque was suggested to have an east-facing mihrab later converted to a south-facing one, and that the excavations did not actually produce evidence that would support (or, to be fair, rule out) this claim (Sharon, et al. 1996). In short, there isn't a lot to go on here. It's not possible to rule out the possibility that WFD 105, FJHP 136, or the now-missing structure at KHI could have been mosques, but that isn't the same as being able to say they are.

Back to the point. Why do Friedman, et al. think the author of the papyrus was likely Muslim? The beginning of their discussion is not promising: "Archaeological suggestions of an early Islamic mosque at KHI dating to the seventh or eighth century are supported by the find of the papyrus" (Friedman, et al. 2017: 292). This is, of course, circular reasoning. The papyrus is likely to have been written by a Muslim if there is a mosque at the site, which in turn is likely if there's a papyrus written by a Muslim at the site. I'll return to this briefly, but first let me lay out the rest of their argument. They first suggest the "Negev desert mosques" as a model, and place the hypothetical mosque near 'Ayn Fidan, the spring to the south of the site. In the next paragraph, they suggest that "structures surrounding the missing mosque functioned as a venue for economic or social purposes," citing the farmstead at 'En 'Avrona (in the southern Wadi 'Araba, near 'Aqaba) as a parallel (Friedman, et al. 2017: 292). I don't think both of these models should be applied to the same site, and I would suggest that 'En 'Avrona, Nahal La'ana (Nahlieli, et al. 1996] and a number of other sites — which have rooms that served as mosques inside structures that look rather like KHI Area L — are probably a closer parallel to KHI than the hilltop Negev mosques. In other words, further excavation in Area L could probably tell us whether there is a mosque at the site or not. Which brings us back to their initial reasoning. The idea that there should be a mosque at the site assumes more about the Islamization of Faynan than we actually know. What we can presently say is that the region continued to be occupied well into the Early Islamic period. That doesn't, however, tell us much about the religious identity of the people living there. One can assume that these people were either early converts or Muslim newcomers to the region, but at our present state of knowledge, this is an assumption. Looking to Petra rather than the Negev may caution against this, as excavations at Khirbat al-Nawafla in Wadi Musa demonstrated that the population was either primarily Christian or confessionally-mixed into at least the late 8th century, and probably rather later ('Amr, et al. 2000). It's also possible that KHI and Khirbat Faynan don't follow the same pattern. Further excavation could very well find a mosque at KHI and continued use of churches at Khirbat Faynan. Presently, we simply don't know.

That said, however, I should reiterate that this is a really incredible find, and I'm definitely looking forward to hearing about the rest of the material they've found.

---Friedman, Hannah, Tasha Vorderstrasse, Rachel Mairs, & Russel Adams (2017). Fragments of an early Islamic Arabic papyrus from Khirbet Hamrā Ifdān Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 28, 285-296 : 10.1111/aae.12099 

Other Works Cited

'Amr, Khairieh, Ahmed al-Momani, Naif al-Nawafleh, and Sami al-Nawafleh. 2000. Summary Results of the Archaeological Project at Khirbat an-Nawāfla/Wādī Mūsā. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 44:231-255.

Jones, Ian W. N., Mohammad Najjar, and Thomas E. Levy. 2014. “Not Found in the Order of History”: Toward a “Medieval” Archaeology of Southern Jordan. In From West to East: Current Approaches to Medieval Archaeology. S.D. Stull, ed. Pp. 171-206. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Jones, Ian W. N., Mohammad Najjar, and Thomas E. Levy. 2018. The Arabah Copper Industry in the Islamic Period: Views from Faynan and Timna. In Mining for Ancient Copper: Essays in Memory of Beno Rothenberg. E. Ben-Yosef, ed. Pp. 332-342. Tel Aviv University Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology Monograph Series, Vol. 37. Winona Lake, IN and Tel Aviv: Eisenbrauns and Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology.

Kouki, Paula. 2013. Site 136, an Open Mosque? In Petra — The Mountain of Aaron: The Finnish Archaeological Project in Jordan, Volume III: The Archaeological Survey. P. Kouki and M. Lavento, eds. Pp. 317-321. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.

Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, Andreas Hauptmann, Michael Prange, Sigrid Schmitt-Strecker, and Mohammad Najjar. 2002. Early Bronze Age metallurgy: a newly discovered copper manufactory in southern Jordan. Antiquity 76:425-437.

Levy, Thomas E., Russell B. Adams, Alan J. Witten, James Anderson, Yoav Arbel, Solomon Kuah, John Moreno, Angela Lo, and Mark Wagonner. 2001. Early Metallurgy, Interaction, and Social Change: The Jabal Ḥamrat Fīdān (Jordan) Research Design and 1998 Archaeological Survey: Preliminary Report. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 45:159-187.

Levy, Thomas E., Mohammad Najjar, Aaron D. Gidding, Ian W. N. Jones, Kyle A. Knabb, Kathleen Bennallack, Matthew Vincent, Alex Novo Lamosco, Ashley M. Richter, Craig Smitheram, Lauren D. Hahn, and Sowparnika Balaswaminathan. 2012. The 2011 Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP): Excavations and Surveys in the Faynān Copper Ore District, Jordan. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 56:423-445.

MacDonald, Burton. 1992. The Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey. Dorchester: The Dorset Press.

Nahlieli, Dov, Yigal Israel, and Yehudit Ben-Michael. 1996. The Nahal La'ana Site: An Early Islamic Farm in the Negev. 'Atiqot 30:67-78, 130.

Sharon, Moshe, Uzi Avner, and Dov Nahlieli. 1996. An Early Islamic Mosque near Be'er Ora in the Southern Negev: Possible Evidence for an Early Eastern Qiblah? 'Atiqot 30:107-114.

Some shameless self-promotion

Posts have been a little light here for a while as I finish my dissertation, but enough things have come out in the last month or so that I should really mention them here. First, and certainly most excitingly, I was profiled in the Jordan Times on December 9 in an article by the amazing Saeb Rawashdeh. Saeb did a great job of presenting the key arguments of my dissertation research and the significance of that research for Jordanian archaeology. I'm somewhat biased, but I think you should check it out!

In the realm of peer-reviewed, unfortunately closed-access work, my co-authors and I published a paper in the most recent issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (if you don't have access to AAE and would like an offprint, please feel free to contact me). In it, we report on ELRAP excavations at a site in southern Jordan called Khirbat al-Manā'iyya in 2012. As I point out in the abstract, Khirbat al-Manā'iyya is exciting because (among other things) it's the first Early Islamic period copper smelting site known in the southeastern Wadi 'Araba (actually, in the entire eastern Wadi 'Araba). In addition to reporting the site, we also discuss how Khirbat al-Manā'iyya fits into the system of industrial settlements, including other copper smelting sites, in the southwestern 'Araba, and how this system articulates with Early Islamic mining in northern Arabia, expanding on arguments we first made in our "Not Found in the Order of History" chapter. I should also note that Brita Lorentzen," who I've mentioned previously on this blog, analyzed the charcoal assemblage from the site and found evidence for the use of deadwood, which tells us some interesting things about how the sparse wood resources of the southern Wadi 'Araba were managed during this period. I was quite excited to be able to work on this site, and I'm even more excited that the publication is out. Note also that it came out in the same issue as David Kennedy's paper on the "gate" features in Saudi Arabia, which got a bit of press, and a very interesting paper by Hannah Friedman and colleagues about an Early Islamic papyrus from the Faynan region, which I hope to discuss in slightly more detail in an upcoming post.

Lastly, I've been co-editing a book called Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives: Digital Technology and Deep-Time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East with my advisor, Tom Levy, and it has also just come out in the Springer One World Archaeology series. It's a cool volume, based on a session at the 7th World Archaeological Congress and a workshop at UC San Diego (the chapters have been updated since then, of course). The idea was that contributors would consider how digital archaeology can contribute to investigations of archaeological "grand narratives," and the contributions both explore the potential of new methods and provide insightful critiques of existing methods (you can check out the table of contents here). In addition to being one of the editors, I'm also first author in the intro chapter, which I think is worth a read (as is the entire volume!).

The southernmost Levant in the news!

Several interesting news stories have popped up in the last few days about archaeological research in southern Jordan and Israel. First, I was excited to see that my good friend and colleague Erez Ben-Yosef's work in the Timna Valley was featured in National Geographic. The gist of the article is that he and his team analyzed donkey dung (kind of a shitty project, to steal a joke from Ben Saidel), and were able not only to radiocarbon date the dung to the 10th century BC, but also to narrow the source of the donkeys' food to regions with Mediterranean climates, hundreds of kilometers to the north. That research has also been published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. It's behind a paywall, but you can at least read the abstract for free. I would do a proper Research Blogging summary, but I owe Erez revisions on a book chapter, so I should probably do that instead. . . But before that:

Second, John Oleson's work at al-Humayma has been highlighted in a Jordan Times article (I've seen it reposted in a number of other places, too) focusing on the earliest Nabataean settlement at the site. The article then goes into a brief history of the site itself — including its role in the 'Abbasid Revolution — and of the extensive research that Oleson has conducted there.

I'm a bit biased, as I'm always glad to see my general research area in the news, but these are both great projects, and the stories are definitely worth a read.

More on finding wood in the desert

I've mentioned my collaboration on Islamic period charcoal with the incredible Brita Lorentzen on this blog before. That time was to point to a short post on the PEF Blog. Note, incidentally, that the most recent entries are about Islamic Bayda, near Petra, and Islamic metalwork in the southern Levant. Told you that you should read the PEF Blog. Anyway, I recently found out that a short report I wrote on the charcoal project has been published in the latest issue of Palestine Exploration Quarterly. The report is only four pages long, but includes some interesting preliminary data on radiocarbon dating results and the charcoal species identification from Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir and Khirbat Faynan. Excitingly, this report has come out right as we're getting ready to submit a paper that, among other things, will include more of the charcoal results. I'll post updates as that starts moving along.

If that doesn't convince you to check out the latest PEQ, there's also an interesting (open-access!) editorial by Philip Davies — that Philip Davies?! No, not that kind of "interesting." This Philip Davies — on the political neutrality of the PEF. Definitely worth a quick read. And it's free!

That new coin hoard from the Sasanid invasion

Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of "Ian rambles about the latest archaeology news." I've seen this story shared in various forms on the various Near Eastern archaeology social media thingummies, and I've read it with interest each time. This is, in part, because much of the reporting on it has been . . . rather strange. The gist of the story is that archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority found a hoard of nine 6th and early 7th century AD copper folles in salvage excavations at 'En Hemed, and based on the dating of the latest coins have suggested that they were hidden prior to the Sasanid invasion of 614.

It's been reported in the Jerusalem Post (use an ad blocker!), which seems mostly to rely on the IAA press release, and a much stranger article has also appeared in the Washington Post. I'm sure there are other versions out there, too, though I can't imagine any are quite as strange as that one.

First, the less strange one. As I mentioned, the Jerusalem Post story mostly seems to repeat the IAA press release, but with nicer photos. The major contribution seems to be that in the JPost story the hoard is called "rare," which is probably not the word I would use, as quite a few hoards can be attributed to the Sasanid invasion. In fact, to quote Alan Walmsley (2007: 324), "Quite a few hoards can be attributed to the Sasanid invasion." Beyond that, it's a bit weird that both the JPost article and IAA release give dates of birth and death for each emperor, which, when discussing coins, is somewhat less useful than regnal dates. (It would, indeed, be quite rare to find a coin of Phocas dating to 547 AD, as that's 55 years before he became emperor. . .) This isn't a huge issue, though, and the rest of the release seems pretty straightforward.

The dating issue is corrected, at least for the reign of Phocas, in the Washington Post version. Sort of. They give the dates as 604-609, which is not quite right for the reign of Phocas, but I suspect the archaeologist, Annette Landes-Nagar, has narrowed this down on numismatic grounds. I'm not a numismatist (and the coins are, as would be expected in a news story like this, not presented in much detail), so I'm not totally sure. I am, however, more sure that it is not accurate to say that Landes-Nagar "estimated that the coins were minted sometime between 604 and 609 because they bear the faces of Byzantine emperors of the time," considering that the hoard also contained issues of Justinian and Maurice, neither of whom was Byzantine emperor at that time.

I imagine that at this point you're saying to yourself, "I don't know. That doesn't seem that weird." Agreed. That is just me being nitpicky. What's weird is that, of the 18 paragraphs that make up the article, only five are about the 'En Hemed excavations. The rest seems to be about the archaeological evidence for early Christianity in Israel and, uh, the existence of Jesus, for some reason. The first, we're told, is "a potent point, offering proof of the Christian connection to the Holy Land and the Middle East, alongside that of Judaism and Islam." This seems fairly obvious, but on the other hand, I don't think anyone who follows the archaeology of Israel will be surprised to see the phrase "proof of the X connection to the Holy Land" in an article. So, fair enough?

Stranger is the point that archaeologists haven't found "physical evidence of [Jesus'] existence." True, but . . . what does that have to do with a hoard of 6th and 7th century coins? I think the idea here is something to do with the development of the Christian community, but it seems like a strange way of introducing this coin hoard, especially since that connection is never made very clear.

None of that is, of course, a critique of the excavations, and I'll be curious to see the publication when it comes out. Considering that the hoard was found in collapse, I'll be interested, in particular, to see if they consider the possibility that it might actually have been dropped during the earthquake of 633, as Russell (1985: 46) suggested for three houses at Bet She'an (where the latest coins, it turns out, were also issues of Phocas). That does seem less likely in this case, but still possible.

Works Cited

Russell, Kenneth W. 1985. "The Earthquake Chronology of Palestine and Northwest Arabia from the 2nd through the mid-8th Century A.D." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260:37-59.

Walmsley, Alan. 2007. "Economic Developments and the Nature of Settlement in the Towns and Countryside of Syria-Palestine, ca. 565-800." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 61:319-352.

Some slightly outdated news

You may or may not have noticed that, since my last post, Landscapes of the Islamic World: Archaeology, History, and Ethnography, edited by the excellent Stephen McPhillips and the equally excellent Paul D. Wordsworth, has been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It's divided into four sections, each dealing with a different aspect of rural landscapes across what might be termed "the Islamic world," as well as a conclusion by Alan Walmsley and a wonderful introduction by the late Tony Wilkinson. My copy arrived in my anthropology department mailbox a few weeks ago, and overall I have to say it's quite excellent. I would say that, though, because I happen to be the author of Chapter 6, which is an expanded version of the paper I presented at the Materiality of the Islamic Rural Economy workshop in Copenhagen. The whole book is worth a look, though, even if mining isn't your thing (or perhaps especially if mining isn't your thing, as mine is the only chapter on mining. . .).

Alternative archaeology update

Well, what do you know? The title of this Forbes story that's been going around today seemed awfully familiar, and it turns out it's actually a review, of sorts, of the recent American Antiquity book reviews section on alternative archaeology. The SAA has, in fact, made the entire section open-access. That's awesome, and if you don't already have an AmAnt subscription you should go out and download it. It's definitely worth a read!

Alternative archaeology and American Antiquity

I don't, admittedly, always read the reviews section of the SAA's flagship journal, American Antiquity. I am, however, quite glad that I did last month (or, more accurately, this month, since I didn't open the July issue until just a few days ago). That is because the current reviews section is devoted entirely to reviews of "alternative archaeology" titles, in a special reviews section, titled "Talking to the Guy on the Airplane." These are worth a read for a few reasons. First, many of them are quite funny, especially if you find "alternative archaeology" entertaining anyway, as I do. Second, many of the reviews make important points about why it is that people are much more interested in alternative archaeology than they are in actual archaeology (for lack of a better word). Stephen Lekson's review, in particular, has some good points about why "all archaeologists not named Brian Fagan" tend to be much less successful than alternative archaeologists at writing for a popular audience. Third, for archaeologists, who often tend to ignore this sort of thing, it's an interesting overview of what's actually out there in terms of alternative archaeology. For example, William Conner's Iron Age America gets a review. I occasionally see him posting to the ARCH-METALS mailing list, and have often wondered what he was all about. Well, now I don't have to wonder anymore!

I do find one thing very strange, though. One of the stated purposes of this special reviews section was to provide laypeople with an overview of what archaeologists actually think of various alternative archaeologies and why we reject those ideas. To quote, "Accordingly, the main intent of these reviews is to offer the silent and curious majority that is interested in these works a professional perspective on them" (Holly 2015: 616). This is, I think, a good goal, especially because, as Holly implies, most of the people who consume alternative archaeology are probably not "true believers." I'd argue, however, that the best way to engage this audience is not to bury these reviews in a closed-access PDF labeled only "Reviews" that only SAA members can download. This seems to me to miss the point. I should note that Holly has uploaded his introductory piece to his Academia.edu page, but maybe if the goal was to reach a wide audience of non-archaeologists, it would have made more sense to make the entire thing open-access to begin with? Or to make all of them open-access at all? Or to advertise this at all? To be fair, this is not the first time the SAA has done a less-than-stellar job of disseminating information to all of the people who might be interested in it. Still, it'd be nice if they did this time!

EDIT: In the course of my Googling on this topic, I've discovered that Jennifer Raff already wrote a better post on this a month ago. She's asked people to pester the SAA about making all of these reviews open-access, but this doesn't seem to have had much success yet, unfortunately.

Works Cited

Holly, Donald H., Jr. 2015. Talking to the Guy on the Airplane. American Antiquity 80(3):615-617.

Iron Age and Roman settlement in the hills of southern Jordan (or, a photo of me appears in a peer-reviewed journal)

I have (as usual?) been remiss in my blogging duties here, and have allowed the August issue of Journal of Field Archaeology (40.4) to come out without blogging about my colleague, Kyle Knabb (et al.)'s, paper in the June issue (40.3). That can't stand, of course.

His paper (long title in the citation below) presents some of the results of a survey he conducted in 2009 in Wadi al-Fayḍ (transcribed al-Feidh in the paper), near Petra in southern Jordan. The focus is primarily on the settlement patterns of this wadi system during the Iron Age and Roman periods. He argues that, during the Iron Age, Wadi al-Fayḍ was settled by people who subsisted on a combination of farming and herding, in contrast to the plateau, where the evidence suggests a "loosely organized agricultural state" (375). During the Roman period, evidence for settlement sites disappears, suggesting that Wadi al-Fayḍ essentially became the agricultural hinterland of more concentrated settlement in and around Petra.

The really interesting part of the paper, though, is that I was, in fact, a member of the Wadi Feid Expedition (WFE) survey team way back in 2009. Actually, now that I think about it, the WFE was the first archaeology project I was involved with in Jordan (followed very shortly by the excavation at Khirbat al-Nuḥās that same year). Should you read this paper, there is actually a photo of me rappelling down a waterfall on page 372 (why yes, I'm wearing a previous pair of Merrell Moabs, although you can't really tell). If you're reading it for the photos of me, though, I should point out that the previously linked National Geographic site is a rather better source of those.

Incidentally, Kyle and I (with a few others) are currently preparing something of a sequel to this paper, which will focus on the settlement patterns in Wadi al-Fayḍ during the Middle and Late Islamic periods. Stay tuned for more.

Knabb, Kyle A., Najjar, Mohammad., & Levy, Thomas E. (2015). Characterizing the rural landscape during the Iron Age and Roman period (ca. 1200 B.C.–A.D. 400): An intensive survey of Wadi al-Feidh, southern Jordan. Journal of Field Archaeology, 40 (3), 365-380 DOI: 10.1179/2042458214Y.0000000004

These boots weren't made for this amount of walking

A little while back (a few months ago now, actually), I was back in Faynan for two weeks of archaeological survey. The project was, unfortunately, right in the middle of the UCSD Spring quarter, but it was small and fun, and we found some interesting things. I'll leave it to my girlfriend to describe those at some point, though, as it was her project, and we were mostly looking for prehistoric sites, which isn't exactly what I do, as occasional readers will have noted. I'm writing about it because, on this trip, I destroyed another pair of boots.

There they are, on the floor in my room at ACOR, looking the way most archaeologists feel when they get back to ACOR after a field season.

This was my second pair of Merrell Moabs. On the one hand, I really like these boots. They're comfortable, they breathe well, and they provide enough ankle-support to survey fairly rocky terrain. Also, they tend to be easy to find on sale, which is nice if you're super cheap a grad student. On the other, I'm beginning to think they might not be my best choice in the future. Sure, survey is pretty rough on boots, but you'd think a pair of $100+ boots could stand up to more than two field seasons. . .

Also, I noticed as I was about to post this that Bill Caraher has recently posted about his own boot woes. To be fair, had I posted this when I intended, I would have beaten him by a few months!

Ceramic aesthetics and decline at the 2015 SAAs

I realized earlier this week, as often happens around this time of year, that the SAA Annual Meeting is less than two weeks away. I should really be writing the rest of my talk right now, but rather than do that, I'm going to procrastinate by writing about the talk here, instead. The conference is in San Francisco this year, which is a bit mundane compared to the past two I've attended — Honolulu and Austin — but, combined with the fact that last year's ASOR meeting was in San Diego, does make my conference travel this academic year relatively easy. I already have more entirely archaeological activities lined up than I'd probably be able to do even if I weren't attending a conference, so it should be a successful SAA trip, even if it isn't Hawaii.

I gave my paper this year a deliberately vague title, in order to try to avoid being put into an "Archaeology of Jordan"-type session. I was moderately successful there, but at a rather large price. I'm instead in the "Studies of Technology, Ecology, and Craft Production in South, Central, and Western Asia" session, which is still a catch-all session, but at least with something of an interesting theme compared to "Archaeology of Jordan." I'd say that I hope the crowd will be bigger, too, but I don't expect to be speaking to anyone but the other people in the session for this one. I have the good fortune of giving the 8 AM presentation on Sunday morning, which I suspect is the least-attended time slot of the entire conference. Ah, well, you can't win them all. Plus, my good friend and colleague Aaron Gidding is presenting in the same session, so it's not all bad.

The talk itself is a review of what we currently know about the hand-made ceramic traditions of the Middle and Late Islamic periods, focusing primarily on a long-lived group called the Hand-Made Geometrically-Painted Wares, or HMGPW for short. Rather than looking exclusively at material from Jordan, I've tried to put together a somewhat impressionistic picture of the distribution of this ware (and related wares), which is surprisingly broad. You'll, of course, have to show up at 8 AM to hear more. Following tradition, here's the abstract for the talk.

Questioning Technological and Economic “Decline” in the Medieval Rural Levant

Ian W. N. Jones

This paper argues against a common view of medieval Levantine villages as isolated from larger regional centers by examining a group of hand-made ceramics — commonly called Hand-Made Geometrically Painted Wares (HMGPW), and formerly “pseudo-prehistoric” wares — prevalent across the Levant from the 12th-17th centuries AD, and possibly longer. They are generally seen as the products of non-specialist village potters and, as the older name suggests, an example of technological decline. That view, though, is based primarily on ethnographic evidence from the late 19th and 20th century Levant, and hinges on a number of assumed, and generally unquestioned, dichotomies: urban/rural, specialist/non-specialist, wheel-made/hand-made. As HMGPW is the most visible indicator of settlement during these periods in the southern Levant, these assumptions have influenced the ways archaeologists conceive of rural Levantine economies, leading to a view of villages as disconnected from larger centers where higher-quality, wheel-made pots were produced. This view, however, is at odds with historical evidence for substantial state investment in rural agriculture. In this paper, I present a broader approach to HMGPW — integrating archaeological and ethnoarchaeological insights from beyond the Levant — that helps us better understand what the widespread adoption and longevity of this “retrogressive” technology says about rural economies.

"Not Found in the Order of History" now found exactly there

I got word a few days ago that a book featuring a chapter on Islamic period Faynan (and southern Jordan, more generally) has just been printed. As you might guess, I'm the lead author on that chapter (with Mohammad Najjar and my advisor, Tom Levy), and I'm excited to see it appear in print. The book, published by Cambridge Scholars and edited by Scott Stull, is From West to East: Current Approaches to Medieval Archaeology, which developed out of the first Conference on Medieval Archaeology. The conference itself was a great experience — and although I couldn't make the second one last year, I hope it continues — and the book reflects this. It's a nice survey of the current state of medieval archaeology, and the coverage is fairly broad. Ours is the easternmost (and southernmost) of the contributions, many of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, focus on the U.K., but there are several on Anatolia, as well, so we're not alone in the eastern Mediterranean.

Our chapter — titled "'Not Found in the Order of History': Toward a 'Medieval' Archaeology of Southern Jordan" (catchy, no?) — builds on the relationship between copper and sugar production that we've previously proposed and places this in a longer-scale analysis of the economy of the 'Araba, from the decline of Petra and a shift to an "Arabia-facing" economy in the Early Islamic period, to the decline of this system and the shift to a "Syria-facing" economy in the Middle Islamic. This is also the first publication, I believe, where we address the Late Antique and Early Islamic period material from our excavations at Khirbat Faynan, which I also covered in my most recent ASOR talk. This is, of course, very preliminary, considering that I gave the talk on which this chapter is based in 2013, but it's still quite exciting. Beyond this, we also try to connect the archaeology of southern Jordan to "medieval archaeology," by which people normally mean the medieval archaeology of Europe. We're not the first people to try to make this connection, but it does open up some interesting possibilities for thinking about the roles that a tiny copper mining village out in the desert might play.

The title itself, "Not Found in the Order of History," is taken from an Exodus itinerary reproduced in several medieval pilgrimage guides (in this case, the 12th century guidebook commonly, but incorrectly, attributed to "Fetellus"), which describes Faynan (or Fynon [Punon, really, I suppose]) in these terms. This account, in turn, is based on a letter of Jerome, who actually had rather more than this to say about Faynan. I discuss this account in more detail in my dissertation and an upcoming publication, but here it serves as a nice shorthand for the problems of doing "medieval archaeology" in southern Jordan. Medieval archaeology and Islamic archaeology are generally thought of as "historical archaeology" (in the broad sense of archaeology informed by history, rather than the narrow sense of "the archaeology of capitalism"). Southern Jordan, though — and Faynan in particular — is, for the most part, absent from the historical sources of this period. What does it mean to do historical archaeology in a place "not found in the order of history"? It's a difficult question to resolve, but we try here.

Interestingly, around the same time I heard that our chapter had been printed I also heard that Hagit Nol's paper in Palestine Exploration Quarterly, "The Fertile Desert: Agriculture and Copper Industry in Early Islamic Arava (Arabah)," had come out. I've been looking forward to this publication since she e-mailed me about it a year or so ago, and it is, indeed, a very cool paper. Hagit looks at a lot of material from the 'Araba, including a lot of work previously only published in Hebrew, and tries to grapple with the rather persistent misdating of Early Islamic sites in the 'Araba — a problem we also note in our chapter. It's funny, though. When I started working on my MA thesis six(ish) years ago, I would have been surprised to hear about multiple publications on the Islamic period in the 'Araba coming out in the same year, much less the same week. As Jasper would say, "What a time to be alive."

Backlog 2: On finding wood in the desert, posted elsewhere

Last year I received a grant from the Palestine Exploration Fund to analyze the rather large amounts of charcoal our project has found at the Islamic period copper smelting sites we've excavated, primarily Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir and Khirbat Faynan. I've been meaning, for quite a while now, to write up a post for the PEF Blog — which is, incidentally, always an interesting read — with some updates on what we've learned so far about charcoal provisioning in Faynan. I've actually, finally, managed to do that, and there's now a short post on the PEF Blog summarizing our preliminary results and (tentative) conclusions. You should go check it out!

Backlog 1: ASOR 2014

Now that we're officially on winter break in San Diego (it's currently a wintry 81 degrees at UCSD), it seems like a good time to deal with the backlog of things I've wanted to write about here but, for whatever reason, I haven't. First among these is the 2014 ASOR Annual Meeting, which was, conveniently, in San Diego this year. Generally, a good time was had by all, and it was good to be able to speak face-to-face with some long distance collaborators and to get to see some good friends working with the Central Timna Valley Project again.

It was nice being on home turf, so to speak, and this was probably the least expensive conference experience I've ever had. Being in San Diego also meant a reception at CISA3 at the Qualcomm Institute at Calit2 at UCSD, which I think covers all of the names I'm meant to include now. I can't speak for everyone, but having been to a few Calit2 receptions in the past, this seemed like a pretty successful one. As is typical of these events — for reasons I don't totally understand — rather than simply enjoy the reception, I also presented briefly on some ceramic research I did over the summer, more on which soon. Given that this was an ASOR reception, there were a few people who were interested in that project, but as is usual for these events, other Calit2 projects tend to draw a bigger crowd. I can, of course, still claim that my research rarely causes motion sickness, so that's a plus.

My talk at ASOR was in a session with several site reports focused on the Iron Age, which, as I pointed out then, was sort of a weird fit, as I was neither giving a site report nor talking about the Iron Age, but the turnout was good, and the other talks were interesting. Following tradition, although it's a bit late, here's my abstract:

Settlement and Economy in Faynan (Southern Jordan) at the Byzantine-Islamic Transition

Ian W. N. Jones, Mohammad Najjar, Thomas E. Levy

It is now established consensus among scholars working in the southern Levant that the Islamic Conquest does not mark a sharp break in settlement or economy, but rather that the 7th century AD is in fact a period of surprising continuity. Despite this, the status of much of southern Jordan during this transitional period remains unclear, due to incomplete ceramic typologies for the Islamic periods and disagreement over the nature of settlement in the late 6th century. However, continuing excavation in the region has begun to address both of these issues, especially the difficulty of identifying 7th century ceramic assemblages.Discussing the 7th century in Faynan has until now been especially difficult. In addition to the issues affecting most of southern Jordan, researchers have also faced a paucity of excavated material spanning the Late Antique-Early Islamic “transition.” This paper presents an updated view of the 7th century in Faynan based on analysis of 6th-8th century material from the UC San Diego Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project excavations at Khirbat Faynan and Khirbat Hamra Ifdan, as well as reanalysis of material from intensive surveys of the region.While Faynan changed substantially between the Late Roman and Early Islamic periods, the key transition — the demise of the state-controlled copper industry — seems to have occurred in the late 4th or 5th century. The 7th century was, as in much of the southern Levant, not a period of disruption, but rather shows continuity of patterns that emerged in the 6th century or earlier.

This is something of a side project, but it's an interesting one, as people have made quite a few claims about what happened during the 6th-8th centuries in Faynan on the basis of very little evidence. Now that we have slightly more, it's possibly to say a little bit more and show that some of those earlier claims are untenable (although, to be fair, some of them were untenable even based on the evidence that was available when they were proposed). This is slowly coming together into a publication, and I'll likely be posting about it again soon.As for next year — assuming I don't go to MESA or the AAAs instead — I already have a title in mind.

Brief notes on archaeology's "Grand Challenges"

Two papers came out at the end of January — one in American Antiquity and the other a two-page Opinion in PNAS explaining the rationale for the first — with the goal of laying out "grand challenges" for future archaeological work. Many bloggers much more widely read than myself have already written about them, but I have a few comments, as well.

1) The authors claim that these grand challenges were the result of a "crowd-sourcing" effort. It's unclear to me why you would call this crowd-sourcing, though, unless you refer to the results of any survey as "crowd-sourced." The crowd-sourcing projects I'm more familiar with — for example Galaxy Zoo or the Valley of the Khans Project — rely on non-specialist interest and effort to accomplish something a) too time-consuming (and tedious) for specialists to work through alone and b) too complex for computers to do automatically. The grand challenges, on the other hand, resulted from a survey sent to several professional associations of archaeologists. That's a sensible group to survey if you only want responses from archaeologists, but I don't see what it has to do with the "crowd," beyond the fact that "crowd-sourced" is a trendy buzzword, while "based on the results of a survey of professional archaeologists" is not.

2) In the American Antiquity paper, the authors state:

The main demographic disappointment was the sparse response from younger archaeologists and students (2 percent). We have no explanation for the low response; this age group was simply not as likely to respond to the request. (7)

As a member of the under 30 age group in question, I actually have a fairly good explanation for why I didn't respond to their request: I had no idea the survey had been conducted until I read the Opinion piece in PNAS. I suspect (especially considering Nicolas Laracuente's comment on Bill Caraher's post) that this was the case for many, if not most, young archaeologists. I don't think the problem was that archaeologists under 30 didn't want to respond, but that the survey wasn't successful in reaching us to begin with. This might also explain why archaeologists over 50 responded by far the most frequently.

3) I actually like this paper more than I thought I would. I'm generally skeptical of "design by committee", and reading the summary in PNAS left me a bit worried, but I think they do a good job in the American Antiquity paper of arguing for the continuing relevance of the challenges they identify, and including a fairly wide range of interests. Certainly I can see my own research as broadly fitting into a number of these categories. What I found strange, though, was the unevenness of the bibliographies provided for each challenge. The bibliography for Challenge A3 ("Why do market systems emerge, persist, evolve and, on occasion, fail?"), for example, includes citations going back to Polanyi. That makes sense to me, because people have been investigating markets for a while. But the oldest citation for Challenge A1 ("How do leaders emerge, maintain themselves, and transform society?") is Clark and Blake (1994). Perhaps the authors saw Polanyi as still relevant, but older literature on the emergence of leadership less so?

4) Under Challenge C3 in the Am. Ant. paper ("How do humans occupy extreme environments, and what cultural and biological adaptations emerge as a result?") the authors note,

These are difficult and expensive places to work, and it is unsurprising that archaeologists are still developing basic culture-historical sequences in many of these areas. (13)

That definitely sounds familiar. It's good to hear that it's not just southern Jordan.As a closing note, this seems like it will definitely have implications for funding, so it's probably something everyone should read, regardless of whether it sounds like something you would agree with.

Works Cited:

Kintigh, Keith W., Altschul, Jeffrey H., Beaudry, Mary C., Drennan, Robert D., Kinzig, Ann P., Kohler, Timothy A., Limp, W. Fredrick, Maschner, Herbert D. G., Michener, William K., Pauketat, Timothy R., Peregrine, Peter, Sabloff, Jeremy A., Wilkinson, Tony J., Wright, Henry T., & Zeder, Melinda A. (2014). Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity., 79 (1), 5-24 DOI: 10.7183/0002-7316.79.1.5

Kintigh, Keith W., Altschul, Jeffrey H., Beaudry, Mary C., Drennan, Robert D., Kinzig, Ann P., Kohler, Timothy A., Limp, W. Fredrick, Maschner, Herbert D.G., Michener, William K., Pauketat, Timothy R., Peregrine, Peter, Sabloff, Jeremy A., Wilkinson, Tony J., Wright, Henry T., & Zeder, Melinda A. (2014). Grand challenges for archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111 (3), 879-80 PMID: 24449827

Conferences past and future

It's been a bit sparse around here, not necessarily for lack of things to blog about, but for lack of time in which to do so. But, I've always heard that you should never apologize for not updating your blog, so that's something I'm not going to do. Instead, since I do have a bit of time right now, I'm going to finish a post I've been meaning to finish for some time, with updates about a conference I recently attended, and one that's coming up.

First, I've recently returned (actually, the conference was the first weekend in October, so not all that recently) from the Conference on Medieval Archaeology at SUNY Cortland, organized by Scott Stull. As much as I love San Diego, it was very nice to be back in the northeast for at least one weekend of true autumnal weather, and the conference itself was quite interesting, as well. I was presenting a fairly general introduction to our work on the Islamic periods in Faynan, since the audience consisted of people working on medieval archaeology in several regions, primarily western Europe. Some observations: 1) I was pleased to see that Scott went with an amusing acronym. I'm not sure if CoMA is better than MIRE, but I'm happy to have been at both. 2) Beyond my own anxiety about the term "medieval," this also really brought home some conversations I've had with other Islamic archaeologists — Bethany Walker especially comes to mind — about communicating periodization across space, where dynastic and archaeological periods don't translate. It's not that it's difficult to default to calendar dates, but that a lot of the assumptions that come with dynastic and archaeological terms have to be made explicit. And then there are the dynastic terms that are used in multiple regions, but not in the same way; at one point, I found myself saying something along the lines of, ". . . Late Byzantine, which would be Early Byzantine in central Anatolia." Certainly that's not confusing. 3) On those same lines, it was interesting and, I think, useful to be odd person out at a fairly small, focused conference. (Interestingly, I spoke with a few other presenters who also felt that they were "outsiders.") I've been at conferences where the Levant wasn't very well-represented, but even at the most recent SAAs we were in an "Archaeology of Jordan" session. I've had to gear talks to people working on earlier periods in the Levant, but it was a different experience speaking to a room almost entirely full of archaeologists working on the same period, but in Europe.

After the conference, I managed to take a little drive over to Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, NY. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from their tasting room (apart from the beer, which I knew would be excellent), since they're part of the rapidly expanding Duvel Moortgat family, but I was pleasantly surprised. Their cafe was, from a San Diego perspective, fairly small and cozy, and the location is really rather out of the way. As evidence, here are two photos I took in their overflow parking lot.

That's definitely a nicer view than most of the parking lots I've been in can boast, and I always enjoy being reminded of how much I love the northeast in fall. It's a comforting thought, especially now that I'm back in San Diego, where the forecast for tomorrow is 87 degrees and sunny. In November.

Of course, I'll be heading to cooler climes again soon enough. This year's ASOR Annual Meeting in Baltimore is just over a week away, and I'm excited to go this year. Our field season tends to conflict with ASOR, so it's not every year I can actually attend, and although I've been several times before, this is actually the first year I'll be giving a paper. This is also the first time I'll be speaking at length about our 2012 excavations at Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir, and the "Archaeology of Islamic Society" session that I'm in this year looks quite good, so I think it's going to be an interesting conference. And, since I'm speaking about it anyway, it seems appropriate to end with my abstract for this year.

Life in a Mining Village: Insights from Domestic and Public Buildings at Middle Islamic Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir, Faynan, Jordan

Ian W. N. Jones, Mohammad Najjar, and Thomas E. Levy

At some point in the late 12th century AD, due to changing economic conditions in Bilad al-Sham, the Faynan district of southern Jordan became an attractive source of copper, after a hiatus in production of more than half a millennium. In addition to reoccupying existing sites, a small copper smelting village, now known as Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir (KNA), was founded during this period. While interesting from the perspective of production, exchange, and consumption, this village also provides a unique opportunity to investigate the mining settlement as a unique social formation, and to address questions not answered in historical sources of the Middle Islamic period.In order to take advantage of this opportunity, the UC San Diego Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project’s (ELRAP) 2012 excavations at KNA focused primarily on non-metallurgical contexts. A large, “elite” building was partially excavated and revealed three distinct building phases, including both metallurgical and pre-metallurgical, elite strata of the Middle Islamic period. Additionally, two probes were dug in domestic buildings, and a third probe conducted in a small, one-room building which may have been a guardhouse.This paper presents some preliminary conclusions from these excavations, focusing on (1) the differences between the excavated domestic buildings, (2) identifying “elites” archaeologically at KNA, (3) the transformation of the elite building into a metallurgical workshop, and, finally, (4) the implications of the ceramic assemblage both for life and food preferences at the site and for Middle Islamic ceramic typologies in southernmost Bilad al-Sham more generally.

Lost Cities, Movie Sets, and Nature's Periodic Cruelty

I have to admit that I was rather excited when I saw the headline "Star Wars home of Anakin Skywalker threatened by dune" in my BBC RSS feed (and not only because, like many Star Wars fans, I'd be happy to forget about Mos Espa along with the rest of The Phantom Menace). The first thing I thought of when I read the headline wasn't the movie, actually, but rather a lecture I saw Michael Moseley give at the Cotsen Institute a few years ago. The talk was mostly about periodic natural disasters in Peru, including sand incursions, and I found it quite fascinating. (If you're interested, he's published on it a number of times, including here, which is conveniently linkable and, unlike many Google Books entries, seems to show the whole chapter.)

This story seems like a neat illustration of that, on a non-catastrophic scale. A movie set is built in the path of a barchan dune, becomes a tourist destination for fans, and less than a decade and a half later people realize that perhaps "in the path of a barchan dune" is not the best place to build something. The slideshow at the top of the BBC piece is nice, although I wondered if Google Earth had more historical imagery. It turns out you can just fly to "Mos Espa" in Google Earth (which really shouldn't have surprised me), but the only image the BBC didn't include is one from 2004. It's pretty cool to be able to go through the 2004, 2008, and 2009 images, though, and see a single vehicle track up the slip face of the dune turn into tracks covering most of the dune until finally, in 2009, the tracks all disappear, covered by sand. It really gives you some perspective on how quickly these dunes can move.

The BBC story is actually a brief summary of an article in press by Lorenz et al. (2013), published in the journal Geomorphology. I have to give the authors props, since it's not every day I get geomorphology stories in my BBC feed. The paper itself, as you might expect for something published in Geomorphology, is primarily concerned with using satellite remote sensing to study the movement of the dunes. There are some interesting observations geared more toward "heritage" and tourism, though. For example, another nearby set building from The Phantom Menace has already been covered by a dune and emerged (seriously, they move really quickly). They note, though, that this caused some fairly significant damage, primarily because the buildings weren't really designed to last a long time or, you know, be covered by a sand dune. This is likely the fate of Mos Espa, too, and the authors suggest that given its potential as a tourism site, something might be done to protect it, like either diverting the dune or just moving the site. This leads them to this great connection:

There would be some irony in such measures being adopted to protect a science fiction film set: it was exposure to eolian transport concerns and countermeasures that inspired author Frank Herbert to write a science fiction novel set on a desert world (‘Dune’) that itself became an epic film. (Lorenz et al. 2013:8)

(Incidentally, beyond its insights on desert cultural ecology, Dune also contains some interesting observations about the uses to which history and archaeology are put, and the processes of remembering and forgetting involved in this. These do get rather heavy-handed by the fourth or fifth installment, though.)

This reminded me of something I actually hadn't thought about in a while: a short literature review I did during my first year of grad school as the initial stage of a cool remote sensing project. That project, for a variety of reasons, never happened, but it did expose me to a neat bit of Hollywood archaeology. The site we were interested in was the so-called "Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille", or the remains of the set built for The Ten Commandments (the 1923 silent film, not the more familiar 1956 Charlton Heston version). The movie was filmed at Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes near Santa Barbara and, after filming, the sets were taken apart and buried beneath the dunes. This was, evidently, a compromise between hauling them away, which was too expensive, and leaving them intact, which would have allowed someone else to come along and use them. Either way, there they were, more or less forgotten, until they were rediscovered in 1983. Comparing the "Lost City of DeMille" to Mos Espa is interesting, because the underlying problem is basically the same (movie sets just aren't built to last very long), but the environmental issues are different. In the case of the Ten Commandments set, the problem is that the sand is blowing away, leaving the site exposed to damage (more damage than was already caused by taking it apart and burying it under some sand dunes, anyway).

I remembered an archaeological project being in the works at the time I was looking into this (it's mentioned on this site, which doesn't appear to have been updated in a while), and wondered if anything had come of that. Unfortunately, this doesn't look good. I suppose something might have happened after the Dunes Center last updated their web site, but I can't find anything. It sounded like a really cool project, though: digging up the remains of what a legendary filmmaker and his crew in 1923 thought late 2nd millennium BC Egypt would have looked like.

Works Cited

Lorenz, Ralph D., Nabil Gasmi, Jani Radebaugh, Jason W. Barnes, & Gian G. Ori (2013). Dunes on planet Tatooine: Observation of barchan migration at the Star Wars film set in Tunisia Geomorphology DOI: 10.1016/j.geomorph.2013.06.026