November 21, 2013, by Matt

Summer Geoging … Jordan

This summer I spent just over 2 weeks out in the desert of eastern Jordan working with 3 different archaeological excavations.

This was the first field trip as part of a new set of funding from the Council for British Research in the Levant to investigate Palaeoenvironments of the Late Glacial Transition in the Eastern Desert of Jordan.

To investigate this we, Tobias Richter (Copenhagen), Lisa Maher (Berkley), Gary Rollefson (Whitman), and myself, alongside large groups of archaeologists, are investigating the environments around 3 key archaeological sites that sit across this important transition in global climate.

Kharaneh IV is a large occupation site dating from 20,000 years agao, during the last glacial maximum, Shubeikha 1 has occupations dated to the time of the Younger Dryas event in the North Atlantic region, and the sites around the Wisad Pools are from the early Holocene. Each site shows significant occupation of people in environments that are today dry and incapable of sustaining large or semi permanent occupations without the help of recent technology.

This summer involved the preliminary study of the areas around the Wisad pools and Shubeikha, to take samples to allow us to begin to reconstruct how the environments of these areas have changed through time; particularity the hydrology of the region and how that relates to water availability. At Kharaneh I spent some time finalising our story of the site to write up for publication next year.

All the sites sit within the large Azraq Basin, which has water resource issues today, as well as those we are investigating in the past – but these are a blog post for another day…

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