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.

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

Ripped from the Headlines: Biblical Archaeology!

Given my recent posts, you'd probably think I work in a much earlier period than I actually do. I suppose I'm going to add to that now by pointing to three stories that have come out of Israel in the past week or so.

First is the news that "King David's palace" has been discovered at Khirbat Qeiyafa, identified by the excavators as the Biblical site of Sha'arayim (I didn't want to comment much on any of these, but I will point to Aren Maeir's response, which is both the shortest and the sweetest I've read so far). Second, a house at Tel Rehov has been identified as the Prophet Elisha's. And the third is the most recent update on Simcha Jacobovici's libel lawsuit against Joe Zias.

I could probably say a lot about any one of these stories, but don't really want to. I bring them up, actually, because I just got around to taking a look at the (open access!) Richard III skeleton paper in the most recent Antiquity (Buckley et al. 2013). The authors of that paper begin their abstract by stating, "Archaeologists today do not as a rule seek to excavate the remains of famous people and historical events" (Buckley et al. 2013:519). One might be forgiven for assuming that the opposite is generally true in Biblical archaeology. . .

Works Cited

Buckley, Richard, Mathew Morris, Jo Appleby, Turi King, Deirdre O'Sullivan, and Lin Foxhall2013 ‘The king in the car park’: new light on the death and burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars church, Leicester, in 1485. Antiquity 87(336):519-538. http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/087/ant0870519.htm

The UCSD Levantine Lab in the Most Influential BASOR Articles

A list of the "10 Most Influential BASOR Articles" was posted about two weeks ago over at the ASOR Blog. I've been meaning to post about it since all 10 went up, but it's been a busy two weeks.

Topping the list, quite excitingly, is “A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna (Israel)” by former UCSD Levantine Lab grad student (and current Tel Aviv University professor) Erez Ben-Yosef, as well as UCSD SIO professor Lisa Tauxe, SIO post-doc Ron Shaar, and Hebrew University researcher Hagai Ron, who sadly passed away in September of last year, not long after the paper was published. The paper, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, is an excellent reassessment of the chronology of copper production in the southern 'Araba Valley based on some of the excavations Erez conducted as part of his dissertation work. It's fantastic that Erez and colleagues made it to the top of the list, and they certainly deserve it for their great work.

The other exciting thing about this top 10 list (for non-BASOR subscribers who don't have JSTOR access through a large university library, anyway) is that you can download all 10 for free until the end of July. I like that ASOR is increasingly making some of their publications available for free, even if only for limited periods. It's not open access, really, but at least it's something.

The list itself, though, I find rather strange. Of the 10 articles, seven deal with the Iron Age (ca. 1200-500 BC), and none deal with topics earlier than the Middle Bronze Age (late 3rd - mid-2nd millennium BC) or later than the Roman period (ca. late 1st century BC - mid-4th century AD). On the one hand, I feel like this might actually represent BASOR's readership, or even ASOR's membership, fairly well. When ASOR changed the name of their more "general interest" publication from The Biblical Archaeologist to Near Eastern Archaeology in 1998, there were (I hear, since I was just starting high school then) a lot of complaints, which I assume stemmed from the fact that many members of ASOR didn't consider periods not covered in the Bible to be a topic of general interest (and I suspect some still don't).

On the other hand, I am a bit surprised that none of these papers made the cut:

1) Whitcomb, Donald. 1988. Khirbet al-Mafjar Reconsidered: The Ceramic Evidence. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 271:51-67.

2) Holum, Kenneth. 1992. Archaeological Evidence for the Fall of Byzantine Caesarea. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 286:73-85.

3) Avner, Uzi, and Jodi Magness. 1998. Early Islamic Settlement in the Southern Negev. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 310:39-57.

Certainly there are others that could be suggested (and I'm not even going to try for the prehistoric periods), but these were the three that I had in mind as I read through the list, expecting to see at least one of them. I'm not saying that Islamic archaeology (or, for that matter, Neolithic archaeology) is necessarily being intentionally slighted here; the Iron Age is a big period, and there was definitely an attempt to cover a lot of ground in this list. But it does seem to emphasize that although Islamic archaeology is becoming a bigger part of ASOR, we still occupy a fairly marginal position there.

But again, it's still quite exciting to see that Erez made it to the top of the list. If you have any interest, you should definitely download his paper for free while you have the chance!

Hyperion in Faynan

Here's another thing that came out while I was in the field, and that I meant to write something about.  A paper by Stephen H. Savage, Thomas E. Levy and myself, titled "Prospects and Problems in the Use of Hyperspectral Imagery for Archaeological Remote Sensing: A Case Study from the Faynan Copper Mining District, Jordan," was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  Actually, it's in the Feb. 2012 issue, but through the magic of the publishing process and the internet, this issue is already available.  You can get the article from ScienceDirect here, and Steve has made the preprint available on his web site here.As the title implies, one of the things we tried to do in this paper was describe the things that didn't really work, as well as those that did.  The inclusion of the section on the Principal Component Analysis is a good example.  Some large-scale landscape features were clear, but the false positives and negatives were a bit troubling, and reflect some of the weaknesses of the method and the instrument itself.  One of the biggest problems with using Hyperion for archaeological research is the rather coarse spatial resolution.  Although the spectral resolution is quite good, with 242 narrow bands (for our purposes only 156 were usable), the spatial resolution is only 30 meters.  As a comparison, newer commercial satellites like GeoEye-1 offer resolutions under 2 meters in multispectral bands, and under half a meter panchromatic.  What this means is that some things just don't show up on Hyperion images.  For example, the primary focus of my research, Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir, is a fairly large site (something like 7 hectares -- 70,000 sq.m.), but it's sparse enough that it's basically invisible on the Hyperion images.  This is something of a limitation, and one of the reasons that the focus of this paper is the Iron Age smelting center of Khirbat en-Nahas, which, as you can see if you read the paper, is pretty densely packed with slag mounds.Anyway, I think it's important to publish negative results along with the positive ones, and I'm glad that we did that here.  You can, of course, read the paper and judge for yourself.

2012     Savage, Stephen H., Thomas E. Levy, and Ian W. JonesProspects and problems in the use of hyperspectral imagery for archaeological remote sensing:a case study from the Faynan copper mining district, Jordan. Journal of Archaeological Science39(2):407-420.