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Jordan TRAINS, TRENCHES AND TENTS The Archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s War Last autumn, Neil Faulkner, Features Editor of our sister magazine Current Archaeology, set out to find the archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s war. We had launched the dig in the pages of Current World Archaeology and it was fast picked up by the national press. There were 28 participants in all, consisting of directors, supervisors and volunteers. We were delighted that so many of the volunteers were CWA readers. Thus the project has become something of a CWA dig. The results were so rewarding that the second field season is already being planned, and CWA will continue to be a first port of call for announcing the latest discoveries. In future we hope that it will be CWA readers who will be reporting from the field on this path-breaking research. Here, though, we give the directors’ view of their first field season. Main picture The Wadi Rutm in Southern Jordan looking appr oximately south-west. The ruined buildings towards the left are the remains of the Late Ottoman Hijaz Railway station. The railway embankment appears as a lighter strip running down the wadi past the buildings. On the near side of the embankment is the modern road, and on the far side (though not visible in the photograph) the old pilgrim road. Below Site supervisor Cat Edwards fills in her site notebook sitting in the window of a Late Ottoman station building at Wadi Rutm. Note the First World War loop-holes hacked through the walls either side. 26 23 archaeologycurrentworld
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The archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s war? We had very little idea what this would mean. A modern scientific archaeology of the First World War is a recent development, and most of what has been done so far has occurred in North East France and Belgian Flanders (see CWA10). Here, on the former Western Front, archaeology is as grim as it gets. The war was fought underground, in trenches, dugouts and tunnels. The same ground was churned again and again by shelling. The earth is saturated with munitions. There are bits of body everywhere in the mud. But what would the First World War look like in Southern Jordan? No-one had ever tried to find out. Archaeologically it was terra incognita. To the west, in what was then Palestine and is now Israel, the British and the German-led Ottoman Turks had fought a fairly conventional war. As on the Western Front, there were lines of trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, and head-to-head battles in which machine guns slaughtered attacking infantry. There were even tanks and fighter aircraft. But east of the Jordan valley, in the country that is today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a very different kind of war was fought. It has been called many things: irregular warfare, guerrilla warfare, people’s war, protracted war, resistance war, the war of the flea (see box feature) – all implying a form of war in which one side may be stronger in men, firepower and logistics, but the other resists with improvised weapons, popular support, and endless patience, fighting a makeshift war of hit-and-run and slow, deliberate, debilitating attrition. What would be the archaeological imprint of such a conflict? We were about to find out. We worked on two sites. One of these lies on the south-eastern edge of Ma’an, the largest town in Southern Jordan, where an important Hijaz Railway station is located. The Hijaz was the famous line that ran from Damascus in Syria to the holy city of Medina in Western Arabia. For the Ottomans, it was a symbol of their religious piety, since it carried pilgrims on the Hajj, and also a strategic lifeline securing a grip on their fractious Arab territories. Ma’an was the most important point on the line between Amman and Medina. Traditionally it was a watering place where the north-south pilgrim route intersected with important eastwest caravan routes, including one to Petra in Above An aerial photograph taken by archaeologists Bob Bewley and David Kennedy in 2000 of the Hill of the Birds immediately west of the Hijaz Railway Station at Ma’an in Southern Jordan. The main trench running down the centre of the picture is 725m long and faces approximately northwest. A second firing trench can be seen right centre. This extends almost to the railway station itself (out of shot). Note the redoubts, formed by ring-trenches, and the various communication trenches. The main trench ends at a steep, narr ow ridge which appears at the bottom of the air photo above. P H O T O R E P R O D U C E D C O U R T E S Y O F B O B B E W L E Y archaeologycurrent world 27 23

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Jordan

TRAINS, TRENCHES AND TENTS The Archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s War Last autumn, Neil Faulkner, Features Editor of our sister magazine Current Archaeology, set out to find the archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s war.

We had launched the dig in the pages of Current World Archaeology and it was fast picked up by the national press. There were 28 participants in all, consisting of directors, supervisors and volunteers. We were delighted that so many of the volunteers were CWA readers. Thus the project has become something of a CWA dig.

The results were so rewarding that the second field season is already being planned, and CWA will continue to be a first port of call for announcing the latest discoveries. In future we hope that it will be CWA readers who will be reporting from the field on this path-breaking research. Here, though, we give the directors’ view of their first field season.

Main picture The Wadi Rutm in Southern Jordan looking appr oximately south-west. The ruined buildings towards the left are the remains of the Late Ottoman Hijaz Railway station. The railway embankment appears as a lighter strip running down the wadi past the buildings. On the near side of the embankment is the modern road, and on the far side (though not visible in the photograph) the old pilgrim road.

Below Site supervisor Cat Edwards fills in her site notebook sitting in the window of a Late Ottoman station building at Wadi Rutm. Note the First World War loop-holes hacked through the walls either side.

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