Wadi el Hasa Archaeological Survey 1979-1931, West-Central Jordan - Hardcover

MacDonald, Burton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0889209650 ISBN 13: 9780889209657

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988

Synopsis

In this major work Professor MacDonald chronicles an intensive and systematic archaeological survey of the southern flank of the Wadi el Hasa in West–Central Jordan. The survey resulted in the recovery of human evidence spanning the Lower Paleolithic to the Ottoman period (500,000 B.C.–A.D. 1918). The area is cut by a number of impressive and deep, south–to–north flowing wadis. As a region marginal for farming but stable for grazing, it would be the first to “empty out” and the last to “fill up” compared to more favourable regions. The methodology employed included a combination of purposive, predictive, and pedestrian transects. Lithics spanning the Lower Paleolithic to the end of the Early Bronze period (500,000–2000 B.C.) and ceramics covering the period from the Pottery Neolithic to the end of the Ottoman domination (4750 B.C.–A.D. 1918) were collected in the area. Sites surveyed included lithic and sherd scatters, camps, hamlets, villages, roads, milestones, fortresses, watchtowers, and mills.

This research sheds new light on the settlement of the area, which now appears to have been most dense during the Middle Paleolithic, Iron II, Nabataean, and Byzantine periods.

About this title

About the Author:

Burton MacDonald teaches in the Department of Theology at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He has studied and worked in the Middle East for the past twenty years and in Jordan for the past ten years.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0889209650
• ISBN 13: 9780889209657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 422