Tales from the Jarash hinterland

By Fiona Baker and David Kennedy
Image: David Connolly

The third and final field season of the Jarash Hinterland Survey (JHS) took place in October 2010, apparently the hottest October in Jordan for a century.
Jarash is one of the best preserved Roman provincial cities and spreads over some 85 hectares with a planned layout encircled by city walls. Its famous colonnaded streets and piazza, theatres, temples, churches, baths and hippodrome are visited by many thousands of tourists each year.

However, for all its obvious historical importance, surprisingly little archaeological survey or excavation work of any great value has taken place in the immediate vicinity of the city walls. The Jarash Hinterland Survey (JHS) commencing in 2005 was established in an effort to address at least part of this problem.

Settling into Jarash Archaeological Camp, the team reacquainted themselves with its many idiosyncrasies and were welcomed by the growing family of rescue cats that long term resident Gabriel had amassed (not to mention his pet parrot).

A sting in the tale

The initial drama of the season occurred on morning one, when Trina –who was new to the JHS survey – complained of feeling unwell. Her rapidly swelling ankle and red pin prick mark was a dead give-away – a scorpion sting! Rescue driver Andrew sagely warned her that the answer, whatever the ailment, would be a jab or two in the backside from the doctor. He was of course right and she soon felt a lot better.

Drama over, the teams set off in earnest the following day at the crack of dawn, laden with survey kit essentials, assorted headgear, enough water to sink a battleship and of course the essential snake scaring, scorpion poking, wild dog defending, measuring and walking aids, also known as ranging rods.
Gathering the statistics

The JHS was initiated in response to rapidly growing urban expansion into the hinterland threatening the unrecorded archaeological landscape and sadly, what this baseline survey has shown is that c. 10% of the archaeological sites around the city are being lost to development year upon year.

In order to come up with this statistical analysis, the team for three seasons have trekked over urban and rural terrain, forest and fields, descended precipitous slopes into wadis, struggled up hills, hacked through vegetation, sighed at yet another quarry (only 220 or so of those) and squeezed, wriggled and crawled into numerous tombs.

Survey routes had to be planned with military precision around the school day to avoid being ‘shabab-ed’ (hassled by small boys). As the school gates opened and the heat of the day became too much to bear the exhausted team would retreat to the base camp’s shady courtyard to re-hydrate. Invariably there would be some amusing incident to relate, such as Paul’s little accident with a discarded plastic chair, which to his eternal embarrassment was caught on the video below (2 minutes 26 seconds in).
Local knowledge


Recording remnants of a Classical water course in the Wadi Deir. Image: David Kennedy

It is all too easy to get distracted from the survey by kind offers of tea, but as always local knowledge is gained as a result. For instance, to be informed that a tomb containing about twenty sarcophagi on Abu Suwan had been used as a bomb shelter in 1973 and had subsequently been filled in leaving no visible trace represented a great result. The route of a Classical water course in the Wadi Deir – now scattered and bulldozed – was shown to us by a man who played in it as a child. An intense artefact scatter also got us excited, only to be told to our disappointment that it had been deposited by trucks moving earth from elsewhere in the preceding few months.

The trouble with tombs

Tombs of various designs and sizes are to be found throughout the hinterland – 203 of them to be precise. Crawling into a hole created by a robber, or squeezing through an impossibly small gap added to the sense of discovery. However, many tombs should come with a government health warning – BEWARE THIS TOMB MAY CONTAIN SNAKES, SCORPIONS AND/OR FERAL DOGS!

Encountering any combination of the above is bad enough but some tombs also contain festering household rubbish along with used baby’s nappies. Unfortunately, the imagined horror of slipping and falling into one these rubbish dumps became a reality for team member Don as he ventured inside to record a large underground tomb. Not exactly the Indiana Jones moment he dreamt of!

Relentless expansion


Don Boyer recording the tomb where piled up rubbish and nappies claimed him as the first victim soon after. Image: David Kennedy

The population of modern Jarash has doubled within 15 years from 21,000 in 1994 to 42,000 by 2009 and is still growing. Although the core archaeological park is protected, well over 100 new houses are being built beyond its perimeter every year and the pace of development and expansion is relentless. Not only is this rapid urbanisation destroying archaeological sites, it is destroying the rich agricultural land along the Wadi Jarash.

The objectives of the JHS were to identify, record and make mitigation and management recommendations for the archaeological sites threatened with destruction. It will also provide a richer basis for understanding the hinterland of ancient Gerasa and the relationship between city and countryside.

Assessing the true impact of development

The actual impact of development was assessed by re-visiting sites (excluding quarried outcrops) surveyed in previous seasons to attempt to quantify the actual rate of site destruction by new development.
■In 2010, 50 sites were revisited from the 2005 survey that also survived in 2008 and 31 sites in the adjacent 2008 survey area at the NW of the city.
■The condition of 45 sites remained unchanged, 6 had been damaged and 21 had been destroyed by new development.
■This means that between 2005 and 2010 at least 42% of the sites recorded by the survey in this area had been damaged or completely destroyed.
■From these figures we can extrapolate that 10% of the archaeological sites within the immediate environs of Jarash are being destroyed every year.
■If this rate continues, 85% of all sites beyond the city walls will have been destroyed within the next 5 years.
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10% of the archaeological sites within the immediate environs of Jarash are being destroyed every year. If this rate continues, 85% of all sites beyond the city walls will have been destroyed within the next 5 years
The project had initially aimed to survey 10 sq km around the ancient city; the 2010 (final) season aimed to complete this plan.

This proved over ambitious and the strategy was revised to focus on joining up the already surveyed areas as far as the W, E and S boundaries of the survey area, covering small gaps and assessing the areas furthest away from the ancient city.

In addition, an area ear-marked for housing development located to the NW of and outside the survey area was subjected to a rapid walk-over survey.

Although not meeting the original objectives, the survey has provided a representative sample, information on site type and density furthest out from the focus of Gerasa and an archaeological overview of the Jarash Hinterland.

So, we bid farewell to Jarash and would like to thank Dr Ziad Al- Saad, his predecessor Dr Fawwaz al Khraysheh and the Department of Antiquities of the HK of Jordan for their approval and support of the project. The JHS Team also thank Abu Abila, Chief Inspector of Jarash and his successor Ahmed al Shami for their assistance. In the field Eman Oweis (2005 and 2010) and a special thanks to Abd al-Majeed Mujalli, (2008) who provided invaluable assistance and for brewing up numerous cups of his unbeatable Yemeni coffee at the end of each day.

Fiona Baker is a graduate of Durham University and has run an archaeological consulting and contracting practice, Firat Archaeological Services, based in the west of Scotland since 1992. She has worked on several projects in the Middle East and Egypt over the last twenty years including directing the Pella Hinterland Tomb Survey.

David Kennedy is Winthrop Professor of Roman Archaeology and History at the University of Western Australia. He has worked in the Middle East for over 30 years, principally in Jordan. Apart from the JHS he also co-directs the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan Project with Bob Bewley.

The project is co-directed by David Kennedy and Fiona Baker assisted by Paul Sharman, Catriona Gibson, Don Boyer, Andrew Card, Anne Poepjes, Ann Boyer, Stafford Smith, David Connolly, Maggie Struckmeier, Francesca Mazzilli, Helene Card and Naomi Poepjes.


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