Green Petra: archaeological explorations in the city's northern wadis

Abstract

Petra is known for its monumental rock-cut architecture and seemingly miraculous existence within a forbidding desert environment. It has also long been hailed as a ‘caravan city’. We argue that Petra's emplacement in its immediate landscape should be a source of equal wonder and interest. This study analyses archaeological remains in two wadis at the northern edge of the urban centre of Petra — known as Wadi Ma‘aysra East and Wadi Ma‘aysra West — to illustrate the nature and pervasiveness of local topographic manipulations. We argue that the dynamic landscapes of these wadis were a significant part of Petra's urban fabric: they facilitated movement in and out of the city, sustained intensive cultivation and were charged with ritual significance.

Keywords:

• Petra
• wadis
• agriculture
• roads
• survey

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the institutions and individuals who made this research possible, namely the Department of Antiquities of Jordan (especially Mr Fares ad-Hmoud, Acting Director General, as well as Mr Jihad Haroun, Mr Akram Atoom and Mr Husain Askar); the Petra Archaeological Park (especially Dr Emad Hijazeen, Eng. Tahani al-Salhi) and Mohammad Almarahleh; and the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR). Financial support for the project was provided by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and Brown University; the Loeb Classical Library Foundation; the Curtiss T. & Mary G. Brennan Foundation; and Pitzer College, with a Junior Faculty Mellon Global-Local grant (2011), Faculty Research and Award support (2011–12) and through the John A. McCarthy chair in Classics (2011–12).

We also thank our hosts, the Dakhillala Qublan al-Fakhir family and the many residents of the Petra area who helped us in this work. We thank Susan E. Alcock and Christopher A. Tuttle, co-directors of the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP) for their invitation to join their team. As part of BUPAP, our research programme — known as the Petra Routes Project (PRP) — was launched in 2010 by M. L. Berenfeld and F. Rojas. A preliminary version of findings was presented in Rojas and Berenfeld (2012) and many of the ideas presented here build upon this earlier work. J. A. Dufton joined the project in 2012, collaborating on fieldwork and this article; he produced the GIS map and database. We thank Nick DePace (2012), Michal Dziedziniewicz (2011), Athanasiou Geolas (2012) and Oscar Sanabria (2012) for their work in the field and Sarah Rhoads (2012) both for her work in the field and for her continued collaboration on the drawings and maps included in this article. We thank Laïla Nehmé for her help with the inscriptions and for sharing material from the forthcoming Atlas Archéologique et Épigraphique de Pétra, vol. III, which will include the northern wadis. We are grateful to Susan E. Alcock and Christopher A. Tuttle for their comments on an earlier draft of this article and to Graham Philip, Editor of Levant and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Archaeological features recorded during the PRP survey are referenced by feature number in this article and in the on-line BUPAP database available at http://archaeologydata.brown.edu/petra with a prefix of wmw or wme, indicating the location of the feature in the western or eastern wadi, respectively, and the unique number assigned to it by the survey (i.e. wme1 and wmw1). The original feature forms are part of the BUPAP archive, housed at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. Throughout this article, features previously documented by other scholars are indicated after wmw and wme numbers in brackets, using the following conventions: BD for Brünnow and von Domaszewski numbers; Mh (Ma‘aysra ‘haut’) for features assigned by L. Nehmé in the forthcoming third volume of the Petra Atlas; and MP for inscriptions previously noted by J. T. Milik. Dalman is cited as Dalman (1908) or Dalman (1912), with feature numbers and page references. A full list of all features discussed in this article, including Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates (Zone 36) and concordance with earlier scholarship, is included in Appendix 1.