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Published: August 7th 2009
weeks 2, 3, 4
I guess you’ve noticed I’ve gotten a bit behind in my blog. It’s now nearly three weeks since the archaeology survey finished. I’d written parts of it as it was happening, but some of it I’ve written a few days ago. I wasn’t sure what to write, so I’ll just put up what I have now. I don’t have many photos from the actual survey because it wasn’t practical to carry my Digital SLR with me most of the time. Check the captions of the photos, most are probably from weekends or the hike, not that representative of the rest of the time. At the moment I'm a bit ill in a stinking hot room in Luxor, Egypt, so I may not have proof-read it as well as I might have.
week 2
I’m trying to watch what I write because people might read this and I don’t want to give the project a bad name, but I’m getting sick of the constant bickering and politicking around the place, particularly from one or two of the other volunteers. One of them in particular doesn’t enjoy being here, so he’s out to make
sure that no-one else does either. Really, I thought seven people was too small for the whole storming/forming/norming/conforming business, but I guess not.
Other than that the second week was fine. We found some interesting stone structures, many of which we don’t have much of a theory about what they’re for, and without excavating them we can’t even tell if they’re Roman or Nabataean, although hopefully the Archaeologist leading this project, let’s call him Andrew, will be able to get the pottery analysed later on and maybe tell from that. There’s stone walls running all the way up some large hills, and then creating terraces in some large valleys and suchlike. Andrew has an idea that what we’re seeing are remnants of a time around the third (?) century when there was a big push to turn soldiers into farmers to stimulate the economy, or something like that. We’re still finding graves but not as many since we’re more up into the hills now. I still don’t quite understand where we’re going because the GIS people are pretty much doing that in their own little world. I think it’s something to do with possible tracks leading between Wadi Araba
and Petra.
One thing I forgot to mention in last week’s blog is that it’s part of a larger plan to develop Wadi Araba as a tourist destination. Since it’s just desert, this is ambitious, but it has support from within the royal family, and Andrew is meeting with one of the princesses. There’s already been about 15 earthen-red brick bungalows built at the site. Hopefully the Roman fort, farm house, and a few other archaeological sites in the area will be turned into an Archaeological park, but I think this is ambitious, who’d want to visit a couple of ruined stone buildings when you could go to Petra? This is why Andrew has proposed recreating the spice route between Wadi Araba and Petra and allowing tourists to walk along it or ride by camel, making it a nice two-day return trip from Petra. This is why part of our job is trying to find where this route went. As part of this, we decided to walk from Petra down to Wadi Araba.
A Jordanian archaeologist working with us - I’m not quite sure what the actual arrangement is, he mostly does his own thing - a “middle
Wadi Araba, Bir Madhkur (survey area) - camels
camels on the track on the way to the site one morningaged” Circasian man, every time when the Andrew isn’t around, keeps trying to discourage us from going. When I was alone with him and the guy who keeps badmouthing people behind their backs, he told me that the area is very dangerous and if we went we would get bitten by snakes, or eaten by jackals. Seriously. Jackals. I’m not sure what his problem is with us going, but he seems very opposed to the idea, although won’t give a real reason why.
It’s funny to see how various people cope with walking up and down rocky mountains in the desert with no shade, standing still to do paperwork, pacing back and forth looking for pottery, and suchlike. It can get quite hot. One or two people got early signs of heat exhaustion at various times. I myself blacked out for a second early in the week, but I was fine after that. It was quite a pleasant feeling, I can see why (according to the media who always beat these things up) there was a bit of a rage in private schools in England or somewhere for rich kids to make themselves faint on purpose. Anyway, there are
Wadi Araba, Bir Madhkur (survey area)
on one of the last days I thought I better take a few photos. This turned out to be a day we drove around a lot and I ended up on the back of the ute. those who people struggle to keep up and have to be constantly told to drink more water, and those who get through the entire field time on only two litres of water and manage to go-go-go like the Energizer Bunny. I’m finding I handle it quite well I’m not sure if I’m much fitter than I used to be or if it’s that the actual amount of walking we’re doing isn’t all that great because we’re constantly stopping to find things. Our work day involves us leaving at 05:30 to get an early start before the afternoon heat, usually getting to the field at about 06:15 or so, depending how much off-road driving we have to do, and then working with one break until about 13:00 or so. This makes the afternoons a bit boring since there’s often not that much to do, since the few archaeology chores that need to be done (paperwork, or the GIS stuff) are taken over by people who are building their little one-person empires and don’t let anyone else have a go.
The hike is scheduled for Sunday, our first weekend day (we work Tuesday - Saturday), so it’s voluntary. Since I don’t
have any actual photos taken from week two I’ll put up a few photos taken early in week three, on the hike.
week 3
This week we documented a large number of large agricultural systems, some of which have been reused but at least some of which appear to be late Roman because of the pottery. As I mentioned last week it’s hard to date these things just by a casual look at them, which is all we normally get to do (by mid this week we’d recorded over 180 sites in the 2½ weeks so far), but hopefully people will be able to analyse the pottery we collect and get a probably minimum date, and maybe someday someone will excavate some of them. In the mid-summer desert sun it’s hard to imagine anyone growing anything here, I understand that it’s quite cool in winter and gets a bit of rain. The water erosion in the wadis would suggest at least some rain. While most of the Bedouin these days live in crappy little government-built villages, some still live nomadic lifestyles with massive herds of goats, and indeed the number of goat tracks across all
Wadi Rum - petroglyphs
looks Egyptian to me, but I wouldn't know really the hills amazes me, they look like hills on farms in Australia, where the sheep or cows have worn tracks into the side of the hill giving a staircasing like as if the hill were drawn on a computer screen with really bad resolution. Obviously any time you hear anything about current affairs in the Middle East or Northern Africa, one of the biggest issues is always desertification. So I imagine that perhaps in Nabataean or late Roman times this area might have been quite a lot more fertile. It would have looked nice. As it is, some of the scenery that we’re driving through, particularly through the wind-worn rocks, looks quite nice.
On the weekend before this week, we did the hike I talked about last week. It’s 14 km as the crow flies from Petra to Wadi Araba, but it’s well over an hour’s drive because there’s no direct road. Part of the tourist development plan would be to recreate the Spice Route and have tourists ride out on camels. However the route we took soon proved to be too difficult for camels, although we did see donkey tracks and droppings. I guess donkeys can go places
Wadi Araba, Bir Madhkur (survey area) - stone alignment
most of the stuff we found looked like this. Thankfully some was more exciting, but for some reason i didn't get photos of them :-( where people struggle. Andrew seemed to treat the whole thing more as a fun hike, than a serious attempt to find the spice route, which was fine by me but a bit surprising. I sort of realized this early on when a few hundred metres from where we’d started off, sort of on the edge of Petra, you could see a clear ancient road, with walls and everything, heading off into the distance in the correct direction, but since our GIS specialist hadn’t seen it on the aerial photographs, and Andrew had gone off exploring, we ended up not following it. Instead we followed a slightly-used Bedouin trail which a camel could perhaps travel if it was riding on the back of a donkey. It was a fun walk though, since it was on the weekend not everyone came, but almost all those who did turned out to be good hikers, except for the one person who didn’t want to be there, and spent the whole hike and most of the rest of the week, trying to make everyone hate it. For a variety of reasons, despite this guy being the weakest hiker in the group, Andrew had decided to
Wadi Araba, Bir Madhkur (survey area) - wadi
This is what the most boring parts of the area looked like - large, hot, wadis. Thankfully we didn't spend too much time in them. put him up the back of the group, from where despite struggling sometimes, he refused to move.
Semper fi and all that. I’m surrounded by Americans.
The scenery was nice and being up in the mountains it wasn’t too hot. From these mountains you can see across the wadis and to the hills of the Nagev, the Israeli side of this desert. We had lunch near some rock caves on the top of a large hill. It was near here that Andrew, always full of energy and enjoying himself, climbed up a steep pinnacle of loose gravel before realizing that it’s easier to get up some things than to get down. The worst part of the walk was the last two or three hours after we got down from the hills, when it got very hot and we were walking through boring terrain. Particularly a “death march” for about an hour across a wadi full of large rocks baked almost scalding hot by the early afternoon sun. We finally got to the “truck” not long before 18:00, after a full 12 hours walk. We then had the obligatory three cups of
chai with the local Bedouin before racing off
as quick as possible for the long drive back to Petra before it got dark, as the roads are quite treacherous for night driving.
This week I learned that one of my little sisters is going to come out to visit me for a couple of weeks with her partner, in India in September. That’ll be nice. I don’t know why they chose to fly to Tamil Nadu, but I’m sure they’ll enjoy it.
week 4
I’ve managed to work out how to avoid most of the gossiping and complaints that come from one or two people so I’m not feeling as frustrated by all the other volunteers this week. Still, by the weekend between the third and fourth weeks I realize that I’ll be glad when it’s over. I still liked the walking around in the desert looking for stuff and don’t even mind the documentation that much, but I didn’t much like going back to our “home” in the drab semi-disused government building in the small Bedouin village where we live, with all the Americans.
As it turned out, we took things a little bit easier this week. Andrew was happy
with all the sites we’d found and seemed to put more of his inexhaustible energy into planning for digs next year when he’d bring a cast of thousands, and the profitable meeting he had with the princess (I think her name is Sharif Hussein, I can't find her on wikipedia, a minor (?) royal who controls a lot of development money in the form of the Hashemite Fund for Human Development). He talks a bit about how the potential development of the “archaeological park” will change things for the Bedouin here … will they turn out like the Bedouin at Petra, who are a very different tribe? I’m still not convinced that any amount of marketing will have this area swarming with tourists. It’s a nice place to work for a while but there’s so many great tourist places to go in Jordan (most of which I didn’t get to see), that I can’t see this one really taking off. At best it would be like Wadi Rum without the sand dunes.
Wadi Rum is where I went for a half-day tour, on the weekend at the beginning of this week. One of the other volunteers had been keen
to go, and I’d promised to go with him. The others had decided not to go, for either of two very good reasons. Either they just couldn’t be arsed; or they’d figured that if they spent five days a week riding around on the back of utes looking at wadis and desert with a purpose, they didn’t see a good reason to pay to do it for no purpose on their days off. Wadi Rum is one of the tourist attractions at Jordan, it’s not far from Aqaba. We found a half-day tour. Perhaps a whole day tour, maybe even one where you ride out on camels, might have been good, although even now (three weeks later in Egypt) I’ve always avoided the opportunities to ride camels. It looks like a hell of a long way to fall without being able to put your feet out to break your fall, off the hump of a camel, and you have no stirrups to balance with either. Anyway, like most other weekends I would have been content to sit in Aqaba’s McDonalds or Gloria Jeans using their free WiFi, or lie in bed in a cheap hotel room watching TV, or in
general doing nothing, not even writing my blog, but I figured that I kind of had a responsibility to go.
So early in the afternoon we met for the tour, which turned out to be a driver who couldn’t speak English, the two of us and a Russian couple who spoke very little English. We drove the one hour or so out to the park entrance, to a Bedouin encampment created for the benefit of tourists. “
Wain Musa?” (Where’s Moses?) our driver asked some young Bedouin who was hanging around. “… Aqaba….” was the reply in Arabic.
So they sat us down in the large tourist area with the camel saddles for arm rests, and served us
chai. As elsewhere in the Middle East, serving guests
chai is part of the code of hospitality. But I don’t think that normally involves serving them one cupful (it should be three small cups) in plastic cups and then running off leaving them to bum around for an hour or more. It’s a good way to waste time I guess. Finally they filled the back of the ute with foam mattresses and we all sat in the back while they drove
off through the desert of Wadi Rum.
The scenery was quite nice, a good place to go if you are passing through Aqaba and don’t have an opportunity to get out into the wilderness areas by yourself. Mostly it was nicer than the Bir Madhkur area of Wadi Araba (where we were working), but not vastly different. It wasn’t as nice, but hard to compare because it was so different, as the scenery we’d seen on the hike down from Petra. The main way in which it was nicer was that it had a lot of areas covered in real sand dunes, looking nice and red, particularly as the sun set, making it look like a “real” desert. We were shown a couple of petroglyphs, a cave where as best I could work out, Lawrence of Arabia had holed up for a while (I think he spent a lot of time in the Aqaba area), a natural stone arch, and a bunch of other stuff I forget. They took us back to the camp again and left us to our own devices again.
One of the selling points of the tour had been that we’d see the sunset.
The sun did indeed set, as is its wont, but no thanks to them. It wasn’t a great spectacle from the campsite either, partly because it was obscured by a large mountain and partly because the campsite kind of faced the wrong direction. They provided us, and a group of about 20 tourists who somehow turned up, presumably doing the tour where you stay overnight and look at the stars. One of the few “city people” on the dig had suggested to us that we simply “had” to stay overnight and see the stars. “The stars are amazing. You can actually see the earth rotate”. We’d both gone on the assumption that they were pretty likely to be the same stars that you could see anywhere else (at least at the same latitude) when not in an area affected by light pollution, so we’d wisely chosen to give that a miss. In all, some Wadi Rum tour is still worth doing particularly if you don’t see many other desert areas in Jordan.
So this week we found another caravanserai, a bunch of hill towers, probably some of them lining the Spice Route, and more agricultural systems. Andrew
Wadi Rum (being a tourist) - cave
apparently Lawrence of Arabia stayed in this cave also got one of the Bedouin (“Musa” - Moses - the eldest son of Abu Musa - Father Moses - who lives semi-nomadically near our survey site with his four wives) to guide us up their path to Petra. We drove up the wadi a lot further than where we’d left the car the week before, and Musa took us up an easier route, walking slowly and steadily the whole way. Since this had been a rather spur-of-the-minute thing, some people who weren’t much good at hiking up hills ended up coming along, but in general it was pretty fun. After an hour or two we could see Jabal Haroon (Aaron’s Mountain), which is at the edge of the Petra area, tantilisingly close and realized that we were closer to Petra than to the Ute. One or two people wanted to go back anyway, so the rest of us carried on, walking into Petra while Andrew on the phone tried to organize the logistically difficult car shuffle to get us all back. So that was the second time in less than two weeks that we got into Petra without paying. The first time we’d gone in through the main
Wadi Rum (being a tourist) - cave
from inside Lawrence's cave, looking out back entrance but had permission to take the ute and free entry; and this second time of we’d walked in from the back so there was no need to pay. I still hadn’t seen much of it though, as both times we avoided the most famous parts of the city.
We still didn't see any jackals. We did however see a snake. It was fairly long but very skinny. Australia has eight of the ten most venemous land snakes (I have no idea whether this factoid is correct, but it suits me for it to be, so I'm going to treat it the way the amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf treated his factoid about Eskimos), so Australian snakes have look of quiet, "don't mess with me, I can kill a horse", confidence, whereas this one looked more nervous. However, judging from the way that Musa jumped, I guess it was pretty venemous. Andrew immediately began throwing large rocks at the snake in an attempt to kill it, even though we were nowhere near civilisation and even several kilometre's walk from the nearest Bedouin tent. It scares us so we must kill it - you can take the archaeologist out
of America but you can't take America out of the archaeologist.
The Circasian archaeologist, the one who told us we'd be eaten by jackals if we went hiking, came out on the field with us one time. In the car, he was talking about how horrible things are in Saudi Arabia (which remember is only maybe 100 km from where we are). Something about how all the princes live secret lives of debauchery. I've heard this before, apparently when they holiday in Spain, they suck the cities there dry of hookers and alcohol. This is usually used as a kind of "hypocrisy" argument that doesn't really impress me.
"I think it must be the worst country. God gave them so much oil but made them hell on earth" he said.
The others laughed nervously as English-speakers do when someone says something politically incorrect, but I coudln't let this go.
"Really?" I asked "The Land of the Two Holy Mosques? Aren't they the country that most closely implements Shariah law though, the way God intended?"
"Yes, they have the two holy mosques" he replied "but I think God gave them bad leaders. You should go there and see
it"
"Yes I'd like to but one can't get a tourist visa for Saudi"
"Oh to get a visa is easy, just tell them you are Muslim"
"But I'm not Muslim"
"Oh is easy" he turns to Andrew ... "you know ......., the German archaeologist, he did it, he wanted a photo of Mecca". Talking to me again. "You just learn the
Shahadah and go to the embassy and say 'I am Muslim now, I want to do the
hajj' and they give you a visa"
Then followed a conversation in the car about how easy it is to get into Islam, of course all that's required is one genuine recitation of the
Shahadah ("I testify that there is no god but God and Mohammad is his prophet") in Arabic.
"Well I know it has to be an
honest recitation. Anyway I'm not going to pretend to be a Muslim"
"oh you won't really be a Muslim. Come on, it's easy, I can teach you now ...
ašhadu ʾanna ..."
"Wait, what? we don't even have half those sounds in European languages!"
About twenty minutes later he was still trying to encourage me to lie to the putative God
Wadi Rum (being a tourist) - petrogrlyphs
hard to photograph in the bright light, but there's rock art there and to the Saudi government, to get a
hajj visa. I don't know why a Muslim would want to encourage people to be fake Muslims. I don't know anything about the German archaeologist, but if he really did this, as well as being slightly (or a lot, depending on a number of factors) unethical, I think it's also pretty ballsy. In reality to get a
hajj visa you need a letter from your
Imam confirming that you are a bona fide Muslim.
We found out late this week that we were going to be allowed to use one room of the building we occupied, for storage for next year’s team. This was good news as I hadn’t been looking forward to carrying all our stuff down stairs and loading it onto the utes and then unloading it again in Amman. So this made the final day of cleaning and packing a bit less onerous than it would otherwise have been.
It was still a long drive back. I was one of the drivers again, and I'm used to driving on the wrong side of the road, and having driven them a few times, was
getting used to the "trucks" (Utes), but trying to follow the other vehicles through peak-hour traffic in downtown Amman on the way back was not great fun. Specially when you're last in the convoy, going up hills if you drop back a bit, or a big truck pulls out in front of you and you have to slam on the brakes, it's hard to catch up if you don't have much power. Anyway we made it back to Amman and went our separate ways and from there on I'll write another blog when I get around to it.
Sorry I'm so far behind with this one. A quick précis of what I've been up to since then:
- I spent three days bumming around in Amman
- then I went to Petra, and then spent two days there
- then headed back to Aqaba, a day wasted there, then took the ferry across to Sinai
- I then spent a week SCUBA diving in Dahab, Sinai (Egypt)
- I then headed to Luxor on a 20-hour bus ride, where I got sick and am sitting miserably in a boiling hot hotel room at 4 a.m.
- soon
Wadi Rum (being a tourist) - camels
Bedouin bringing his camels home for the night I intend to fly to switzerland and spend two weeks there catching up with my cousins, uncles & aunties, whom I haven't seen for 15 years
- after that I intend to fly to India, assuming I get my visa in time, and spend most of the rest of my time there.
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