The DEEPSAL Project: Using the Past for Local Community Futures in Jordan

ABSTRACT

The Deep Past as a Social Asset in the Levant (DEEPSAL) project, conducted in 2015–16 by the Council for British Research in the Levant, examined two communities in southern Jordan, Beidha and Basta, who live near significant Neolithic archaeological sites. The project collected information on the communities’ current socioeconomic conditions, their relationship with local cultural heritage and how that cultural heritage currently benefits or hinders them. The information was used to inform nascent strategies to utilize the sites sustainably as development assets and suggest alternative strategies as necessary. The results showed that a tourism-based strategy is suitable for Beidha but there was a need to focus on basic business skills. For Basta a tourism-based strategy is currently unsuitable, and efforts should rather focus on supporting educational activities. The results of the project are presented here within the context of archaeology’s increasing interest to use archaeological resource to benefit local communities, and outlines lessons for that effort.

KEYWORDS:

• Jordan
• community development
• public archaeology
• sustainable development
• cultural heritage management
• neolithic archaeology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy, through their Strategic Development Fund.

Notes on contributors

Paul Burtenshaw

Paul Burtenshaw is an independent researcher and consultant on cultural heritage and sustainable development. Between 2014 and 2019 he was the director of projects at the Sustainable Preservation Initiative. The Sustainable Preservation Initiative is a US-based non-profit which develops sustainable community economic enterprises associated with cultural heritage. Burtenshaw’s PhD research (completed in 2013 at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London) examined the concepts around the ‘economic values’ of archaeology, how they are used to mobilise value for, and justify the preservation of archaeology at international, national and local levels, and the methods archaeologists can use to measure economic value. The research utilized the case study of Wadi Feynan, Jordan. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for British Research in the Levant, Amman, as well as co-organising (with Peter Gould) the Archaeology and Economic Development Conference held at UCL in September 2012, published in a special edition of Public Archaeology.

Bill Finlayson

Bill Finlayson is professor of prehistoric environment and society at Oxford Brookes University, and a visiting professor at the University of Reading. He was previously the director of the CBRL, during which time he led conservation, experimentation, and presentation projects at the site of Beidha. His research has focused on hunter-gatherers and early food producing societies, with extensive work in Scotland and Jordan. While serving as the manager for the Centre for Field Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh he became increasingly involved in working with local communities, engaging them in and presenting their heritage. During his time in Jordan he began work to raise the profile of early prehistory as an important aspect of the country’s cultural heritage.

Oroub El-Abed

Dr Oroub El-Abed has a PhD in development studies from SOAS and is currently a principal investigator with the Lebanese American University/Centre for Lebanese Studies examining trajectories from education to employment among refugees and locals in Jordan and Lebanon. She worked for twelve years before starting her PhD and had empirical exposure to the field while working with UN/World Food Programme in Iraq, NGOs in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, added to policy exposure through working with the World Bank- Iraq mission, Fafo studying the globalised labour opportunities and their effect on Palestinians living in camps in Jordan, ICMC/Austcare and UNHCR studying Iraqi refugees in Jordan. The academic exposure started with Professor B. Harrell-Bond in Egypt at the American University of Cairo/The Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Center where she taught Palestinian refugee issues and continued teaching at SOAS and lecturing at several academic venues and conferences.

Carol Palmer

Dr Carol Palmer is the director of the CBRL’s British Institute in Amman. She is an anthropologist, environmental archaeologist and botanist. Her research interests focus on two main themes: the first is on the relationship between humans and the environment through time, especially through the study of plants. The second is on recording rural and Bedouin life in its many forms, the contemporary and recent use of plants on the broadest level, cultivated, gathered and grazed, and the effects of changes in food production practices on the landscape and in society. She is a member of the Thimar research collective, a group of largely university-based researchers who document and consider the problem of production and livelihood in rural societies across the Arab world. She is also an honorary fellow at Bournemouth University.