Synopsis
In 1986 and 1987, Oleson and a small team surveyed an area of 250 sq km around the site of al-Humayma (ancient Hawara) in Jordan's southern desert. Hawara was founded sometime in the first century BC by the Nabataean king Aretas. The flourishing settlement was occupied by a unit of Roman soldiers after AD 107, and it became the largest settlement in the Hisma desert during the Byzantine period. The Abbasid family built a manor house and mosque at Humayma in the late seventh century. In the course of the survey and excavation, the team documented 83 cisterns and other hydraulic installations, 26 km of aqueduct, portions of the Via Nova Traiana, first century Nabataean campgrounds, houses, and a shrine, one of the best preserved Roman Principate forts in the Near East, five Byzantine churches, several Byzantine houses, the qasr (large residence) of the Abbasid family and the mosque in which they plotted the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate. The site was more or less abandoned in 749 AD, when the Abbasids moved to their power base in Iraq. There has been only very light modern occupation, and the site has been unoccupied since about 1973. This is the second volume of a projected four volume series of reports about research on this important site. The first volume appeared in the ASOR Archaeological Reports Series in November 2010 (no. 15). The second volume reports on a Nabataean campground, which provides unique testimony to the flexible character of Nabataean settlement design, and provides a detailed information on the Nabataean necropolis, which shows parallels with those at both Petra and Hegra. The volume also includes the excavation records and analysis of five Byzantine churches, two of which lay above Nabataean structures, and three of which were modified for re-occupation in the Early Islamic period. There are also short reports on the probing of an Early Islamic structure of undetermined character, and on an important hoard of coins and jewellery found in the countryside. A number of subsidiary studies concern the human remains, botanical and faunal remains, fish bones, and molluscs found at the site in the course of the 11 seasons of excavation. The ceramics and small finds associated with the structures are analyzed, along with the many marble chancel screen fragments The main audience will be archaeologists and students concerned with the architecture and economy of Nabataean through Abbasid period settlements in the desert Near East. The presentation highlights issues such as the projection of culture from Petra outward to peripheral settlements, transitions between nomadic pastoralist and sedentary agricultural ways of life in Arabia Petraea, design eccentricities in rural church architecture, the spread and practice of Christianity in this region, and rural architecture of the Early Islamic period. There is also discussion of the physical evidence for local desert agriculture, stock raising, hunting, the import and export of foodstuffs, and the state of human nutrition at ancient Humayma.
About the Author
John Peter Oleson, an archaeologist and Classics scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada, where he has taught since 1976. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Board member of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member of Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He was appointed a Killam Research Fellow for 2000-2002. In 2010 he was awarded the Pierre Chauveau Medal by the Royal Society of Canada for his "distinguished contribution to knowledge in the humanities." Professor Oleson's research focuses on the Roman Near East and ancient technology, particularly ships, harbours, and water-supply systems. He has directed or participated in underwater excavations at a number of Roman harbour sites in Italy and Israel, and between 1986 and 2008 he directed excavations at the site of Humayma, ancient Hawara, an imperial Roman fort in Jordan's southern desert. The first volume of the final report on these excavations appeared in 2010: Humayma Excavation Project, 1: Resources, History, and the Water-Supply System (Boston 2010). He has broad experience in surveying remains of ancient technical installations, particularly hydraulic structures. He has published 12 books and more than 95 articles concerning ancient technology, marine archaeology, the Nabataeans, and the Roman Near East. His recent book, The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (New York 2008) in 2009 was awarded the Eugene S. Ferguson Prize by the Society for the History of Technology as the best contribution to the field in the previous two years. Robert Schick is an archaeologist and historian active in Jordan since 1980. He has focused his efforts on the Byzantine and Islamic periods and especially on the Christian communities during the Byzantine to Early Islamic transitional period. In addition to the churches at Humayma, he has excavated other early Christian churches at el-Lejjun, Umm al-Jimal, al-Quwaysmah and elsewhere in Jordan. He is currently a research fellow at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, writing the report of an old excavation of the Byzantine and Early Islamic remains in the Madaba Archaeological Park. Dr. Schick has also worked in Jerusalem, where he taught archaeology courses at al-Quds University and Bir Zeit University in the mid-1990s and he has been studying the Islamic sites and monuments of the city and the holdings of the Islamic Museum on the Haram al-Sharif. He also taught in India in the early 2000s and is at present directing a survey of archaeological sites on the east coast of Andhra Pradesh.
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