Yorke Rowan | Kites, Tombs, and Houses in the 'Land of Conjecture'

[Applause] thanks very much for the very kind introduction Chris I really appreciate it and thanks to all of you for coming out this evening it's it's really amazing to see so many people come out to hear about a region that so few have know very much about or have ever even visited and so I'm hoping that by the end of the evening we will all you will all be able to count yourselves amongst the fued know something about the black desert of Eastern Jordan I wanted to offer just a little bit of a road map of where this lecture will go and I want to offer a very brief overview of how the project initially started and about the region in general of course and then secondly I wanted to look it just give you a few examples very summarised examples of some of our excavations to date which have really been quite limited and I'll show you some of the reasons why they've been so limited third I'll introduce you to the problem of attempting to accurately survey and map areas that are far richer than we realized or than anybody have realized and finally I'll offer just a few interpretations and discuss their future goals for this research project the eastern body archaeological project study comprises sort of a west east transect across the southern part of the eastern body and you've already heard Chris use that term bhadiya it simply means desert this is the black desert in the panhandle of Jordan that long part that reaches out towards Iraq north of Arabia north of Saudi Arabia we selected this area just to try to include some different sort of minor ecological zones and to provide opportunities to assess the evidence for links with the Levantine corridor obviously to the west the haram to the north northern Arabian Mesopotamia the two areas we selected will comparisons based on these excavations survey and subsistence our broader goal is to record and study the architecture the artifacts and petroglyphs integrating that data with biological and climactic data in order to understand human occupation and use of the region we're particularly interested in preliminary evidence that suggesting that there was a fluorescence of human activity in the black desert that was possible during the later prehistory because of environmental conditions possibly much more favorable than than in the present modern situation well one of the reasons there hasn't been a whole lot of work in this part of the Jordanian Panhandle is that it's such a difficult marginal area it's rarely discussed and as all of you know many of the projects that are often discussed are in the Fertile Crescent of course this is the marginal area not the marginal area outside of the Fertile Crescent you can see that large black area this is the black desert it's called so because of the assault flows the lava flows that extend from southern Syria right across the mid part of the dam handle Jordan and down into into southern Saudi Arabia this means that it's a very rough territory and very difficult to traverse nonetheless people of course will try and hear some of the early efforts in the early 20th century to get across this area there even now there is one asphalt road that goes from say Amman to Baghdad and the rest of it is flat and basaltic area so over land transport in the early parts that say the British Empire were very difficult and these were just some of the solutions and of course you see Henry field with his Cadillac and presumably his lunch or dinner or strapped across the front of the car there's an area that was one of the problems for the British was to move from more quickly than that to move from Baghdad to Cairo and get the mail going from one place to the other the overland transport was so difficult and so slow so the solution of course was to fly and there's this wonderful book by our chief marshal Sir Roderick Hill who wrote a book about the travels of the Royal Air Force flying the kyla to Baghdad mail route and this is one of the maps from his book the Baghdad airmail published in 1929 he refers to various places and in the title of my lecture of course I've referred to the land of conjecture and that's what's really going to be our major focus this evening is what he called the land of conjecture that basaltic area but I can't resist also pointing out a few of the other names that he gave to places that he could see below him I was just recently and he he did mention that in fact he knew probably the Bedouin didn't have the same names as what he was giving for the landscape that he could see that he was flying over so Landon conjectured probably not the local term down below and probably also not the plane of unfulfilled desire which I've highlighted there and also probably not the plane of Sorrows which probably reflects more on the loneliness of being a lonely Wow RAF pilot going across the desert I also mentioned this because he did he did say that some of these places such as you won't be able to read it most people except for maybe in the first row where you can see things like sickles furlong and a few other names like that where there have been some aviation problems that are accidents out in the desert he also and these are quotes from Sir Roderick Hill in his book found a place quite odious that place was the epitome of loneliness all around the hills rose like odias flattop slag heaps very desolate and filled me with a sinister foreboding there was another pilot who was also one of those flying across this region making the same route and that was Percy Maitland and Maitland flew over this particular May so that you see in the picture on the left and this isn't it came to be known as Maitland's hill fort now Percy Maitland thought that this looked very much like an Iron Age fortress that he had flown over in Wales and you can see you could just make out in his picture that was published in the first year of the journal antiquity still an ongoing journal of international fame you can see around the edges of the Mesa how how do you get the impression that it looks like walls or some sort of fortifications but as we'll see that's actually natural much of it at least obviously these pilots got a perspective that we can't really see from the ground now and so they started recognizing things like these structures that you can see it all over the top of Maitland's 4 so this area that we're gonna look at first is the wadi i'll cut off a mesas and here you see we've numbered the mesas there's another series of mesas to the south of this but the ones that we'll look at this evening where we're focusing our research of the wadi el khatallah and mesas and this one is a more modern picture of Macklin's mesa taken by david kennedy who flies all over Jordan takes aerial photographs makes them publicly available it's really a remarkable service and we're very lucky to be able to use these kinds of photos he's taking pictures of Maitland's Mesa and you see you can see that we've numbered all the different structures on top of Maitland's Mesa and along the edge you can see this whole series of structures now already I've mentioned that not a lot of research has been done out in the area but I would I wouldn't want to give you the impression that nobody had done anything and in fact there there has been a little bit of work done in the region and one of the pioneers of doing identifying some small prehistoric sites particularly working in the 80's and 90's is Alison Betts who you see on the Left Professor Betts visited us and we sawed pools for I think more for old times sake than anything but she worked with us and it seemed quite enjoy the rather rough circumstances and so although very few people have done some work we did know that before 7,000 years ago there were some small bands Hunter's making really pretty in substantial structures out in the desert and that was largely due to Allison bets now another one of the pioneers of archeology in Jordan is Professor Gary Wallace and you see on the right and this is who suggested that we start a project when we visited Maitland's Mesa together when I was in Jordan this Fulbright Scholar in 2006-2007 so there it's not that there's not been very much that there's been no research done out there but it's been very very slender and Gary is actually much better known for the thing that's light up behind ghazzal so he's actually only started working in the desert about ten years ago as well and in this picture you might be wondering what he's doing he is working on making some desert coolers as he calls them by wrapping a wet bandanas around your beverages so that they'll be cooler cooler than the ambient temperature of 105 or something like that it's very refreshing not everybody's convinced this is very very very pleasant so this is Maitland's Mesa you can see how the mesas are capped with a thick layer of salt so these these are parts of those lava flows below that is limestone and so this is how they've eroded and you can see how the basalt is crumbling eroding off of the edge and going down the slopes that material of course is being used as building material as we'll see one of the things when we visited when I visited with Gary Raulerson and my co-director Alex wass was that there were structures like these you see that were pretty substantial stone blocks large circular structures ranging anywhere from three to eight meters in diameter and we thought that perhaps these looked a bit like what are known as nawa means the no Ami's are dry masonry burial structures that are known in Sinai and similar types of structures are also known in other places as a Saudi Arabian Peninsula but that's known from Sinai in several different and at least three major concentrations which you are still standing as far as I know at least as of the 80s and 90s so we thought that this might be what we were looking at at Megan's Mesa now Macklin's is different than in some of the other masons because it has a whole collection of these structures on top most of the other mesas at least one Mesa wouldn't our tomb on top of it but not so many structures like this so what you're looking at is a tower tomb that's been looted and all of the tower tombs on each different Mesa have been looted some of them probably some time ago and then a series of chambers Caryn's along the edge of the Mesa this is just an image of the tower tomb you can see how it must have stood fair amount higher you can see that it's still standing at least several meters and all of that stone that's been thrown out by looters or has collapsed from earthquakes what meant that it must have been the 4 or 5 meters high at least originally those Cairns that are along the edge of megwin's are also a little bit perplexing we know them from other sites in Yemen and Saudi Arabia similar structures and we don't really know even what to date them to they seem to be connected to that tower tomb and you can see how a lot of them have sort of collapse people have pulled rocks out of course because there's gonna be gold inside right as far as we can tell there is nothing inside and there you see a drawing there of some of those that are still in pretty good shape there are other structures on top of Maitland's Mesa some look pretty ephemeral don't look like they have a great deal of depth others seem to be maybe standing stones or walls and vertical slabs and even some things that we called Borobudur huts the Glitter are what the local Bedouin call those flat-topped mesas and we you can see what the picture on the top is what a these single-celled structures look like and then below you can see where we've ex excavated a double cell one on top of a Mesa unfortunately we found almost nothing inside of those structures I mean no Flint tools no radiocarbon nothing carbonized so really difficult to know what they were doing there or even how to date them just generally speaking on top of the Mesa we do find some artifacts those artifacts only loosely date things so there's some stone tools that we know from other sites that they ranging anywhere from late Neolithic to the early bronze that's a range of about 3,000 years so late prehistory perhaps dates some of these structures on top would be on that we're really not certain on the slopes down below of Maitland's there are other structures that we've started to notice it actually took us a while to recognize these structures on the lower slopes because we had been focused on the aerial photographs and looking at the top and there are at least 80 different collapsed mountains and this takes us back to what we thought these might be no Ami's on these lower slopes we thought we had possibly a cemetery why there would be a cemetery out in the desert we weren't really certain but it seemed interesting and for instance this structure you can see there's sort of a radial pattern to collapsed basalt slabs and we thought that this might be in Awami and this this one we selected for obvious reasons it didn't look like it was looted it was obviously collapsed it even still had a standing doorway so this seemed a little bit similar to a burial chamber in excavating it we quickly found out that we were wrong and in fact it turns out to be a well made structure and it even seems to be corbelled and by corbelled I mean that the the the the stones are cantilever to be able to make a roof heading in words to the top and there would have been a central pillar that's that was there but no longer standing we'll see some examples of still standing ones you can see the flagstone of the later interior and the D's on the right side of the drawing mark where there were two doorways remarkably there was even an outside storage room that still had a standing pillar still had a roof being held up by that's that little pillar and this was just on the outside attached to that building so not only did we know that we did not have a burial structure or in no Ami's but in fact it seemed that we had a late Neolithic structure of the type that was really not familiar now to be honest as Chris said I have a little more expertise and other things in a slightly earlier later periods and so something late Neolithic like this I'm not an expert on it I feel like I'm getting there now but this was relatively new to me but my colleagues are well versed in the Neolithic and a structure like this is not very typical you see the two doorways we were lucky enough to find one one piece of charcoal that we could date as any archaeologists can tell you one one radiocarbon date is not the world but it's better than nothing it made us very happy and that radiocarbon date is 54 82 53 20 calibrated BCS so in the late Neolithic towards the end of the late Neolithic and that's even supported we didn't get that many finds from that structure but the arrowheads that we found in the structure are also late Neolithic and that also works very well with us having a late Neolithic house on the slopes of Megan's Mesa as you see here you can see the doorway and the storage to the side now that's that was surprising and we still weren't really convinced though just thought this was maybe a one-off and we got a late Neolithic house it also doesn't help us answer some of the major questions still to deal with in Maitland's so there are indeed late Neolithic houses on the lower slopes what are all these structures on top I'll just point out to you that it looks like the top of that Mesa has got a bit of a bowl shape a bit of a dip and you can see where sediments are collecting and it appears and it's nothing right now more than a guess that it looks like water was collecting up there because we had thought that there were maybe animal pins on the topic who would do that to sort of force all of your flocks up on top of a Mesa unless it's defensive but if there was water catching up there maybe but worth it what we're thinking now is it's possible that they were actually planting things up on top of the Mesa because water was caught there in the women it's just a just a hypothesis now and it's something that we'll be working on we did actually drag the Oriental Institute members Society who in on the Jordanian trip this past year out to visit the structure which is a little worse for the wear because looters are always convinced that we've missed the gold and they will find it and then start tearing buildings apart unfortunately so there you can see the intrepid travelers made it all the way out to Maitland's Mesa which is a two-hour drive over very rough roads from Oz Rock in case you know where Hawk is more like four or five hours from Amman and those so there we have our group just below maple and Mesa well after excavating that structure we then went to the other side of Assad pools we excavated another structure that we thought would be a burial chamber and that also was not a burial chamber in later returning to another Mesa in the Wadi Petofi area we started our eyes were getting better and we started to realize that in fact there are a whole series of these collapse structures at another Mesa just one kilometre up the wadi you can see all of these different all the little collapsed piles all around something on the order of hundreds and some sort of wheel radial wheel with interior straight walls and then we decided to excavate this structure over here you can already see where we started the excavations so at this point you thought that we might be excavating something similar and sure enough another structure it's actually not as similar to the other one as you might think yes they're both round and yes they're both a few meters across so generally similar but this one you can actually see that the central pillar is still standing and in fact there are other pillars still standing in built into the wall here you see a hearth and a very narrow entrance and even one that's probably collapsed so this doesn't seem to be a core vault structure nonetheless it is a late Neolithic structure near to the other one it had a lot more arrowheads so that helps understand that it was a hunting some sort of base for hunting and you can see the radiocarbon dates that I've put there in blue in the lower part you'll notice if you could still remember the radiocarbon date or the last structure that they're not that close they're almost a thousand years apart so this is sort of both ends bracketing both ends of what's known as the late Neolithic it had very nicely built interior hearth and surprisingly it also had plaster in fact a double layer of plaster you can see the original layer of the plaster up here and then it was replastered and you can still see the fingerprints of where they pressed this gypsum plaster right in to the floor of the interior we had more arrowheads their heads on the right are quite large clearly for a larger game and then we even had a piece of obsidian the obsidian it's not an arrowhead but the obsidian is almost certainly going to be traced back to Anatolia we've been working with Tristan Carter's and his XRF lab at McMaster University in Canada and any of the obsidian we've sent to him so far has come from Anatolia so we're quite sure that this one will as well so that was a very quick and brief introduction to what's going on in Wadi el kotaki now we're gonna move on over to the side poles now Wadi kotofey is probably about 60 kilometers from the town of Oz Rock and so that's about four hours five hours driving from Amman and wa Saad is about another 60 kilometers to the east of Wadi el katifaq which means about two more hours driving through the desert think of it only 60 kilometers takes about two hours it's quite slow going now Assad pools looks quite different no mesas and very difficult to see much in the landscape but in fact there are a series of pools natural pools but pools that have been had little check dams so they've sort of enhance the pools so you can see there's about nine pools over the course of about one kilometer this is declination of only about ten meters so it's not a great deal of change between where the first pool is over here and where it empties out into the playa into the mud pan now around these pools are a whole series of structures we'll see some other pictures of them but you can already start to make out many of these collapsed piles as well as other things that look like animal corals this is where we can't this is our this is our accommodations for the four weeks out there you can you might have difficulty making out the muddy water that's still there because when we arrive sometimes it's rain and if it's rained in the immediate area the pools do actually have water in them although not for very long because in fact the Bedouin come up with big trucks big water trucks and suck the water out and take it away to their flocks so this is our camping spot I think somebody's probably cleared a little spot there some sort of heavy machinery into something I should point out that in the early days of our work we were pretty desperate and that's how we sort of kept ourselves out of the Sun originally we would just get a nice tarp and stretch it out against the rocks and put it in the door at the truck and huddle down there sort of like scared and very hot mice for the entire afternoon it was pretty rough going now we're feeling much wealthier and they actually had some intents that we can hide under in the afternoon and we're mentally more comfortable as you can see we're just swatting flies and happily in our in our recycled coffee being shade and that's basically what you do for the entire afternoon and I should add here that if this is something that what's appealing to you and you hate the internet and you're tired of taking showers you really should consider joining us because we have neither so with thought pools has got a whole cluster of structures as well and they're they're really concentrated close to the structures we've numbered about 125 of them and we know from walking around the whole area and taking GPS points on a lot of them that there's many more hundred that we have not mapped I'll just point out a few features here of course here you see the pools down here cutting in quite deeply there you can see what is a kite like a hunting trap an animal trap we'll talk about that in a moment and you can even see some long Cairns like we saw on the edge of Maitland's Mesa so you can see why we would have thought that maybe this was a cemetery we had only excavated that one structure at Maitland's mesa when we came to this site so with great optimism and interest we selected another structure and began clearing that you'll notice that this is quite a large pile of rocks they're basalt rocks they're extremely heavy and it takes a while to clear them so in fact this structure structure number 88 the sod pools took us two seasons to excavate and it's actually still not really quite complete we started clearing the rocks and of course we started clearing the rocks with wonderful undergraduates who make rocks literally just float away and we quickly realized that there was something odd about this there was a wall on top that was kind of shabby yes it's lined up and they're big rocks but it doesn't really look much like some of the other things we found it was only after the second season of excavation you sort of suspected there was something odd about the this this sort of wall that you see and by the second season we realized that in fact some enterprising person at the very end of the Late Bronze or early Iron Age had decided that this Neolithic structure below it would make a great place to put their tomb and built it on top of the neolithic house and so unfortunately the human remains were like powder from from whatever reason they were not very deeply buried of course they were really just in the rocks probably but the artifacts were not badly preserved and so you can see a bronze ring in the upper left hand corner a a silver silver earring just below that and over on the right a bronze Arrowhead so these can be dated to other sites further west in Palestine and Israel to the very end of the Late Bronze - or early Iron Age so somewhere around 1200 BC very slow going and this is the reason it's so slow going we're a very small group of people eight to ten people and these slabs are incredibly large heavy and if you think about it dangerous because you certainly don't want to have one finger or a toe underneath that so we try to be extremely careful because we're very far from any serious help so this and know not only is it difficult some of them are too large to even pick up but we have to sort of flip them one by one and in doing that we're trying to also not destroy ourselves but also not destroy the archaeology that we've so carefully excavated many hundreds of pounds of dead Rock we'll do a lot of damage if dropped on the archaeology so you can see some enterprising and I'll note enterprising women with just one one guy from the from the royal family in Jordan helping out this it's a lot of very hard work moving all those rocks but eventually we did it and you can see below structure that looks well round like the others that we've seen but in some ways quite different it does seem more complex it has different rooms has different areas it has features built inside of it I'll give you a few clues as to some of the enigmatic letters you see you have to call these things something while you're in the field so P stands for porch or portico because we had to know what person is referring to in a refers to an alcove and G is just an area of grinding slabs and D as the doorway so this is quite a complex structure it's probably been reconstructed quite a bit I'll draw your attention to the lower right hand corner where they see the rope the the radiocarbon dates there's actually five radiocarbon dates now from this structure but they span the course of pretty much the entire late Neolithic so from about 6,500 to 5,600 BC that's not to say that people lived in this building the entire time for a thousand years they probably reoccupied it rebuilt it change things around but it was intensively used and there's a lot of artifacts and a lot of animal bone inside of it in the excavations surprisingly for people who seem to be mainly hunters there are also a lot of very large grinding slabs and you can see just a few very near that central pillar right along here and I'll point out the course that there is a central pillar here another one here another one here again note how low these pillars are it's probably difficult for you to see but they're just a little over a meter high we don't really understand what the roof looked like on these because a meter is only enough to crawl around on your hands and knees and that seems pretty impractical to me so we haven't really figured out how this worked or what the roof looked like or did it really have a roof it must have had some kind of proof I've wondered if perhaps these pillars held up poles for skins that kept them up a little bit higher my colleagues don't buy that so I guess I will just put that out as a hypothesis these large grinding slabs do suggest that there was some sort of processing going on and that we would guess perhaps plant processing them you can see how there's sort of a mortar divot in these large slabs and there's quite a number of them so this would suggest a fair amount of processing that's going on otherwise you wouldn't keep putting new ones in the structure and adding more of them and just over in the corner where we see this doorway that has probably been refashioned it's probably used to be the whole doorway and then they closed it off narrowed it down and right where you see that little red and white spike we found a little in the doorway just in the nope just in the inside of that doorways as if it was a little offering of a straggle like gazelles dragged a lot quite a surprise now you those with youth sharper eyes will notice that these are not all entirely in situ because somebody didn't realize what they're excavating right away but this is in fact that the context where they were found we still do some things old-school and drawing everything inside of the structure with planning frames is the way to go and so you can see people working on drawing everything one of our concerns though is to understand if there are plants what are people doing out here why are they building such big structures this is not something that people who are constantly moving on the landscape you would expect to be doing you would expect them to make flimsier kinds of structures that we know of from earlier periods this is really a lot of substantial building a lot of animal bones a lot of materials all in one place so our guess and we're starting to get some evidence to support this guess that there were in fact better conditions better environmental conditions and possibly even some soil when these people were there and some of the evidence for that is where Matt Matt Jones the geo geomorphologist from University of Nottingham is checking and taking OSL samples and core samples from under the building where we're finding these gritty permeable soils that might have been protected because the buildings were built on top of that he's also taken core samples from out in the in the kaabah Playa and the core samples have also found some interesting results some pollen and an OSL day that falls even though the OSL date is very broad either way you look at that OSL day it also fits in the late Neolithic whether it's the beginning or the end it's not precise enough to say but again he's finding that sediment at the right kind of date in his cores where the sediments are piling up in the in the client his student Haroon micron found pollen in some of those cores pollen from cattail and bulrush and this suggests that there is a much marshy or kind of environment than what we see now not just some water but actually standing water long enough for that to maintain Jen Ramsay has identified fig both fig seed and fig skin and so here you see her scanning electron microscope examples of some fig and seed that were found there but probably most dramatic and most interesting was the discovery by Brita Lorenson that we have Quercus if the burnses otherwise known as tube or oh come out to war oak now as you could see in any of those drawing illustrations that you've seen so far there are no trees out there and it would be very surprising to see IO could be able to survive out there at this point the closest stands of open can currently see or a good 200 kilometers away to the west and the highlands of Jordan it places say closer to Ashley moon jerash or even possibly you would also find some examples of oak in this area which is a highland area of southern miss syria so even though our sample that piece that Bertha learns in evoke that she recognized it was just a twig so this is not proof that there is a forest of oak out there but it is suggestive and the distance suggests that people were probably not dragging out oak logs that far away out into the desert for building material tree just burn them now our follow analysis we we have a lot of animal bone from inside of that structure of course over the thousand years a lot of animal bone has collected and the preservation was actually better than we originally expected only a sample has been studied by Alex Vause who's doing our analysis of the animal bones but so far he's already recognized that gazelle are with the dominant species and then wild on injured donkeys are also well represented in the sample as well as wild hair what isn't well represented there's some examples but a small part of the follow assemblage is domesticated goat and sheep that's quite small so if these were herders we don't have very good evidence to demonstrate that one other thing that he found that was quite surprising some Asiatic Lion the paw of an Asiatic Lion or at least some bones from the paw of an Asiatic Lion as well as some other large cats something like a cheetah or a leopard so that was quite a surprise now in this lecture already you've seen some arrowheads in this slide I'd like to show you some rather different kinds of arrowheads and of course I don't expect everybody to be amazed by the arrowheads but there are a lot of arrowheads which is perhaps not so surprising given the amount of time that that building was used and reused what's particularly interesting is that as you see archaeologists like to represent their arrowheads with the point up with the business end and you'll notice all of these of which 90% of the arrowheads from that structure were this type this transverse Arrowhead you'd think they're upside down because that's the point in but in fact this is the sharp end so there are sharp little razors the transverse arrowheads are something that's known from across a large region from Egypt well into Syria and is thought to have been some people have argued that it's maybe a hunting component that there was a series of them but at any rate however they were used they are really prominent at this structure I would guess that because they're so small they might have been used for the hair and for the wild fowl but we've been attracted by the the pools the anthe the birds had not been studied yet at the site so we don't know what kind of birds would be there but it wouldn't be surprising that there would be some some pretty good examples just to support the idea that there are shafts being created out of whatever local materials whether it's some sort of breed or wood we find these sort of engravers for straightening shafts and we'll call them shafts traitors and so you see that indentation for creating a nice straight shaft for your arrow to go on well generally speaking an archeology lecturer without some pottery would be missing something luckily we get very little pottery so you will to endure it and any pre historians get a little you know they get a little while a little crabby if they have too much pottery we're very happy with this pottery because that's about half of the pottery we found what you see right there that keeps it at a manageable level and it's diagnostic pottery which is all you can ask for really this is what's known as your Mookie and pottery you can tell both by the red exterior and by the the herringbone pattern that you see this is typical of the our Mookie and pottery better known from Palestine in Israel that fits very well with the dates that we have from the site with the with the arrowheads another thing that was really wonderful about the slide is that it was clearly people clearly had time to produce a lot of beads and so they were using different materials that were coming from some distance some of them not a great distance and some of them we don't know where from so you see the red stone that's carnelian we don't actually know where the carnelian is coming from and as far as I understand I believe there's a graduate student working on this question right now for his dissertation where is the carnelian coming from we know that it's that it exists in the Indus that seems like an awfully long ways away maybe there's another sources closer but there are some other materials as well that are not immediately local at the site something called dhaba marble that indicates that people have connections or moving across the landscape which is perhaps not too surprising so I highlight this especially the arrowheads because this is quite different than what we saw the other structures the other structures had arrowheads but there were pretty big arrowheads and in this building we've seen lots of these various small transverse arrowheads which form 90% of those hundreds of arrowheads we found it suggests that people we're really exploiting the water resources nearby small game not just gazelle but we will come back to the gazelle so keep that in mind so what I'd like to do now is turn said that we talk a little bit about excavation and that's that's enough small artifacts I suspect for the evening and now let's turn to survey now there's a number of different ways to get a good idea of how things look from above now one way is just to bring your good old not very expensive deep sea fishing rod out to the desert and put your camera on it and I'll set it to take off take a shot to a few seconds from that you can do marvelous things get overhead shots do your photogrammetry and do a very accurate representation of the structure so this is that strut that Neolithic structure on the side of matrons that's wonderful and a great solution for smaller structures but if you need to really spread across the desert and do some survey that's gonna be a pretty slow way to do it so one of the solutions we've been working with is using drones on piloted aerial vehicles now luckily we're working with somebody who has been flying these things since he was a kid with his dad and built them himself so the one that you see me holding that's as close as I'm allowed to get to it I'm allowed to touch it that's it Chad Hill has been building these and he gets these from model kits they're they're basically model airplanes and gets the desert ready did so these are you probably noticed the drone on the right slide known as the DJI and multi loader type of drone it's its advantage is that it can take off vertically and land vertically very handy but not as efficient with battery power the advantage of the fixed-wing that I'm holding in the picture is that it can fly a lot longer and it can and the stews battery power much more efficiently which is pretty important when you're out in the middle of the desert those batteries are very expensive they're very heavy you need to bring a bunch of these lipo batteries with you and then to repower them with your generator takes many many hours so I didn't want to show you just a little bit of it and let's say this is always the technical challenge part of course to see this is of course the pilot Chad Hill getting ready to take off and let's see oh yes now this is actually already old old stuff old technology old imagery and so we're taking off and we're just going to do an abbreviated flight over with side poles because we've edited this down so you'll notice some choppy bits where we've cut out so that you're not sitting here for a 20-minute flight but it is useful to be able to see the landscape around the sod pools and to be able to see well how flat it is how many structures there are and how much you can see from above-ground how much better you can see it from up there let's see right there you'll notice a wall heading off kind of looks like a kite wall or some sort of meandering wall headed off to the car we'll see some more of those in a moment when we look at kites and one of the problems is is that this the imagery that you're seeing is just a camera on the front of the plane the camera that's actually taking pictures in order to put to stitch it together for your survey map is in the body the fuselage of the plane pointing straight down and it's taking an image every couple of seconds the problem is landing the plane the take-off was not so bad I saw that work went pretty well but landing the plane without smashing the camera or even getting a speck of dust in it because as we all know it only takes one speck of dust and then the camera thing won't open properly anymore and so bringing it back down in such a rocky landscape of course that's an advantage of the multi rotor that can go straight up and down but the plane can stay up in the air so much longer Chad and I had been debating about how to land it in such a rocky area and he suggested that we land the plane right here on this nice sandy stretch except for that's not as easy as it looks and he got paranoid rightly so I think and did what you do in any plane right and circled around for another truck he'd wanted to land in it right on the sandy area there and in the past we had we'd had other solutions for getting the plane down safely as well and so we went back to the old tried-and-true use the soft belly of an academic and the plane will be fine because it's nice and soft and at the end despite all of that good imagery that comes out of that there are some times disasters and of course the desert is not a place for disasters that is I think that is the same plane it's not that we've only had one plane sure because so that was a very sad affair of course it was even sadder because we had a backup plane but that backup plane had been caught up in customs so we didn't actually have it out in the desert with us remarkably enough I must point out that chad is not only such a good pilot he's also good at putting these things together together so we had a brief respite from this particular episode of flying and collecting survey data we took all those parts back that we could find except for the destroy camera the destroyed GPS and other components inside he found those components in the Mons somehow where you're not allowed to buy drones and that plane that you see before you flew again and we took it back out to the desert and finished it I how that's possible it took a lot of glue some tape hot glue guns which are not hard to find in Amman luckily and that that flew again so what is this good for I mean it makes for a nice video but it's also very useful for orth rectifying images and being able to put them into GIS and be able to make maps out of photographs this is an incredibly accurate way to be able to do something that in traditional methods would take so much longer that it's also almost unfathomable so this is an ortho photograph taken of the pools and I just wanted to point out that what we're gonna look at next is these are going to be petroglyphs that is rock art that are gonna be concentrated right along these I don't know I shouldn't call it cliffs because it's only say 8 to 10 meters we're talking about but faces of the salt where people are pecking animal figures over 400 of them just in that small area and so what we're doing is trying to survey them and collect all the data that we can on all of the different petroglyphs in the area and of course these are not painted these are packed right into the basalt so on the left you can see something with big long horns it was clear that horns were particular obsession because we don't really see any gazelle represented lots of things with horns so on the left you see what looks like maybe we're not sure on the right what seems to be great clearly an ibex because it's got those nice novel e curved horns of an ibex and then it's got some sort of spiraling geometric thing that I believed was there before they put the ibex and I have no idea what that is a person falling off I don't know other other animals as well again something that looks like I think my colleague had called it a gazelle and I changed it because that really does not look like gazelle horns to me maybe an ibex with a dog chasing it and something that looks like a nice big bowl so they were very fond of representing animals there very few of people there is one nice episode of sort of a hunting scene difficult to make out I realize of course this is the literally the best we could do is night photography and so you have one ibex to mx3 ifx and actually to human figures one there and one there they're both holding something that could be a spear or an arrow you can see one there the other ones pretty difficult to make out so something like a little hunting scene of hunters going after some ibex so what was surprising is that they were also representing hunting trapped hunting structures that we will talk about in a minute on these rocks so these big traps for hunting animals particularly gazelle were represented and represented pretty you know pretty commonly in the petroglyphs around the pools you can see all sorts of squiggly lines but what it is is a large enclosure with the little cells that are always found around the edges of the enclosures of these hunting traps and I'll show you some more examples in a minute if you aren't familiar with them or don't know what it is we'll talk about them this is one of the better examples and part of the reason I say that is because it's incredibly hard to make out but there's actually an animal in the animal trap right there you can see the legs of body and some curly horns well of course what we're really interested in doing is sort of knowing how many of different types there were what their connections are to each other which parts or scenes where animals represented next to traps to try to make some contextual sense out of more than 400 representations in this tiny little area so we're mapping digitally mapping out where you can see the red and all the different figures all the different animal figures as well as humans and the blue or those types of traps the animal traps the structures so this is clearly people had a little time on their hands anyway pecking these into the rocks perhaps this is what they were doing while they are waiting for the animals to show up around the pools and so in their spare time doing some nice art work of course things that were important to them were these animals with large horns this is a little perplexing we don't know how to date the petroglyphs we haven't had we don't you know we don't have an easy way to date such petroglyphs painting you have a shot the petroglyphs are very difficult the animals are not represented you'll notice that I talked about the animals that we found in the in the faunal assemblage where things like gazelle and on inter and hair we didn't see any of those in the rock art we saw things with big horns ibex the ibex don't even aren't even naturally occurring in this area so this is a bit perplexing and we don't know what the rock art dates to it's tempting to say deal with it but the Neolithic final assemblage doesn't represent these types of animals of course people also still like to represent what they find very important to them and in petroglyphs and modern day people find a Mercedes tanker truck one of the most important things that you need to get the water and food out to your flocks for larger survey the fixed-wing plane is really what is more useful we are attempting to do and have flown over a thirty-two square kilometer area of though of the mesas at Wadi kotofey and that took a number of different flights as you saw had some accidents and some problems but it's now all mapped it's all been something like 22,000 images have been collected and we're now starting to work on actually over marking all the different structures that we've identified in that 32 square kilometer area both on top of the mesas and down on the slopes so here's one of the mesas you can see the structures that are a few on top but a lot of them clustered around on or shoulders this is the ortho photograph and then over here you see a hillshade model so that you can see the structures more clearly one of the fascinating things that is going on out in the body out in the desert in general are the kites these animal traps and the animal traps are very often found on these long chains so what you're looking at is satellite image and each red triangle represents an animal trap what that's called a kite because those early aviators thought they would play the shape of the kite and ever since we've been calling them kites a fair amount of research has been done usually using satellite imagery to look at the kites because you can spot them from the satellites unlike the smaller neolithic structures so here we have the wadi kotofey area and over here Assad pools I'd like to show you an example of a kite it actually is gonna be one from this chain here they're incredibly hard to see from the ground because they're not big walls so this one is a kite it's got an enclosure you can I hope make that out pretty clearly you might even be able to tell that it's kind of got a green fuzz it doesn't look so gray and brown and dead and that's because we were there in a spring something I'd never done before it was beautiful actually there were flowers they were Bedouin with camels it was remarkably different than being there in the summer it's very pleasant this kite is a large enclosure and you see these small cells and you'd there'd be one there and one there that it buried you can see some there there and there so this large enclosure and it's got these long walls extending they all extend to the east where the animals were presumably coming towards the cooler climes in the West and probably better watered areas now I wanted to show you just a short clip I don't think we'll even run through the whole clip of the sub drone imagery because this was being used to corral these animals into the enclosure is it moving yes it's moving and you will notice the difference in the drone imagery because this is being done with a the nice new fixed-wing drones so it gets a nice very nice smooth imagery as as it rotates around now what you're looking at of course is these long walls in some kites they go on for kilometres and they're being used we we assume that there are people probably dogs stationed along these walls to scare herds of gazelle towards and into this funneling area within and in towards the enclosure of the kite now for a long time I've assumed and I assume that I believe that many of my colleagues also had the same assumption that these little cells here and then closure when the animals showed up the hundreds were hidden in there and came out with their bows and their spears have killed all the animals inside the enclosure however surprisingly enough colleagues of ours while abu Aziz and women Chris I have excavated inside of one of those cells with a kite and what they found is that inside of this cell it was deeper there was several meters down and inside of it was a partially articulated gazelle and so this suggested that in fact the trap is that cell and the animals cannot see that it's a deep inclination pit and they fall into the pit and if that doesn't kill them they can then easily be killed by hunters now that's just one example I'm not convinced that that's the only way that they work but it was intriguing it was surprising to find that out and so you can see just how many of these would be all around the edge and I'm not I'm not really certain that that's the only way it worked but it's a fascinating discovery that they've come up with you you can see as these walls go off you won't be able to tell that there's other meandering walls that seem to connect these kites and sort of that chain that you saw in the satellite imagery so that they're really sort of coming all down along a ridge so the animals are going to be forced one way or the other into some sort of trap this must have taken a huge amount of labour a huge amount of time even though those walls aren't very tall it took a lot of work in order to set these things up across the desert for kilometres we do have a problem with date we don't know exactly what they date to we have some that seem to be Neolithic we have some from southern Israel that seemed to be late catalytic early bronze just one they may have been in use through that entire period and so then you this is yeah basically the four of us just standing inside of the kite and you can see those radiating walls hopefully you're not dizzy already I also just wanted to show you an example of how difficult it is to see these walls he's standing inside of that enclosure of that kite you can tell that that's where the wall is but when you even using the word wall seems inappropriate because that's that's a line of rocks and even if it was a little higher it wasn't much higher there's not enough rock around there to be a serious wall this one's a little bit easier to see I know that that's the kite ball and you can see it a little bit better because it's not mixed in with so much wrong but even so you can see that it's quite low quite small little ground just another example of some of their worth of photographs of the mesas that were taken with some of the drums that we've put together you can see lots of Corral's or a malp in some of these might be pretty recent some of them might be historic a relatively small Mesa that's losing a lot of its basalt that's been torn away and used for these structures and you can just make out a kite it's actually maybe a double kite or one that has been repurposed refurbished just once and so here we highlight some of the walls just so that you can see them better on top of the ortho photograph and so this is the kind of process we're going through for that entire 32 kilometer square square kilometer area to map in all of the structures now another example of a kite and what I find interesting and shouldn't be surprising but people were very conscious of their landscape of course any hunter would be they were using the landscape to their advantage for building these animal traps for building these kites so this one is on top of the largest Mesa at Wadi it's called tell a from historic times or number to Mesa - and you can see walls that are coming all the way up the Mesa from different directions leading into the enclosure and then the small cells all around the edges like we've seen and then over on the precipice on the edge of the Mesa more cells in the walls so the animals can either fall down over the edge fall into into one of these cells but they don't have many places to go using the the edge of the Mesa this is another example a little bit different where they're using two mesas smaller mesas really so you have a mix on this side and mace on this side and walls that are channeling the animals in and very steep sides of the mesas so they will sort of naturally go away from that anyway and then the walls will make sure that they'll stay inside of that funnel it's a little hard to see the enclosure so here's the same one from a different angle from the other side now one of the things that we started to recognize as we started to process this data and look at our imagery is the the way that we discovered a couple more kites in Juanita's Hoffy so this is why he could toe fee from pretty high up and you can see that we've outlined some of the kites that you've just seen such as that one that came between two mesas or the very large one that went up the very large Mesa what we're starting to see is starting to guess is that these kites may have actually had connecting walls so that it was a long chain and that chain was also using the mesas just like on the long meandering walls of the the long chain that I showed you in the satellite imagery so that the animals who are coming you can see they're all open to the east as the animals come they're gonna find either a wall or they were gonna run into a Mesa and they're gonna have very little chance to go anywhere else but inside of one of these enclosures this is something that we still really need to test one thing that we've talked about is perhaps using some thermal imagery to be able to see if some of these walls these dotted lines and we can't actually see might be able to be just just discovered just below the sans so we think that we have a similar plan where these people were using the kites and the maces as a long chain for hunting we're now looking at something that we really didn't recognize before and that is that it seems like there is more data and creasing quantity of good data that suggests there's something that we're tempted and probably going to call the black desert Neolithic a hunter-gatherer herder kind of cultural complex that people are using varied economic strategies and they're they're adapted to the desert or in fact we're guessing that it was maybe more of a stepping environment if those animals that we've seen all the gazelle and if they're processing plants all this is leaning towards suggesting that there was more soil and probably a better watered atmosphere at the time than there is now so it must have been a bit more inviting than it is now and the hints people are willing to invest a lot of effort in the hunting and in the structures that they were living in this might have been because there was an increasing population I mean people were already hunting gazelle before this time before 7000 BC why start building all these big kites at great effort unless you need to actually start producing more calling more producing more animal skins and perhaps even more Drive I've tried flesh more protein this is gonna be a tough thing to prove because they're trying to date all of those different kites it's gonna be tough they probably were being used for a very long time but but you know by later periods in the in calculus there were almost no people out there so by about 4000 BC there seem to be very few people out in the desert again one of the questions that we still need to answer well there's quite a number of questions we need to answer actually one of them is are they also hurting animals out there do they also have domesticated sheep and goat and you have a little evidence for it are they taking them out there and they're not using them because the hunting is what they're relying on when they're out there and they're just using the milk so for this the many well-constructed late Neolithic buildings that we've seen even though it's really just for that I've that we've excavated so far it suggests that there was a real fluorescence in the late Neolithic of people spending a great deal of time in the desert exploiting it pretty heavily and spending perhaps a better part of the year out there rather than just a few months that we had originally guessed that these these communities do seem to disappear soon after that and so that's another question that we are gonna have to work on you know as it was that climate was it because the gazelles were so fully exploited was it wasn't both reasons there's a lot of work that we still need to answer on that question finally we still need to finish surveying that area if we saw pools you saw that I have a nice little map just at the core area but there's a large area there that we really haven't mapped we haven't surveyed it in and we need to have a better sample perhaps than two buildings at either site really understand are there any late Neolithic burials out there are there cemeteries are there other later periods structures we suspect that there are but of course we know that there's a Late Bronze in an Iron Age bury it's probably not just one there's probably some others so with that I just want to leave it there I wanted to emphasize how much we wanted to thank the many institutions that have supported us of course but also especially the many people who've gone out to this really sort of desolate very hot place and put in so much hard work for us because without them none of this really would have been possible and so again let me emphasize that if anybody knows some young people with very strong backs who hate the internet and hate taking showers we are we are looking for people you should come and talk to me and so thank you all very much [Applause] you

Channel: The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

Views: 16,845

Keywords: Jordan, Black Desert, Archaeology, petroglyphs, ancient hunting, tombs, Oriental Institute

Id: obG9NylMgWo

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 07 2018