Masuh – An Endangered Roman and Umayyad Village

Masuh is a rarity – a large Roman village in the hinterland of Philadelphia (Amman) which was not overlain 50-100 years ago by one of the scores of modern villages that grew up on the ruins of the past. One of the earliest aerial photographs of the site – taken by the German Air Force in 1918, shows the buried remains in isolation except for dozens of beduin tents nearby. A vertical photograph of 1953 still shows no buildings at the site. By 1998 there were several houses and gardens eating into the ruins and chance finds had resulted in the excavation of two churches with splendid mosaics.

Damage has continued ever since and can be traced through successive Google Earth Images (from 2004) and APAAME’s own frequent aerial photographs (from 2009). The results are alarming.

As the two Google Earth images show, between 2004 (Fig. 1) and 2016 (Fig. 2) most of the houses visible at the earlier date (blue on Fig. 2) had been extended and many new houses added. The most recent aerial photograph (taken on 28^th September 2016) shows (Fig. 3) that even the clearance that had already taken place on the northern edge between the church (top left) and the beginning of the village itself (red circle) has had the further attention of a bulldozer which is eating into the area of buried housing.

Beyond the area of the village itself, our monitoring has revealed similar destruction of cemeteries – discovered and looted and being destroyed, and external structures damaged.

It is not too fanciful to say that this important survivor may be largely gone in a further decade as population pressure in the vicinity of Amman continues to grow.

The APAAME web site hosts 835 (mainly aerial) photographs of Masuh:

http://www.apaame.org/p/the-apaame-team.html

Fig. 1. Google Earth image of Masuh on 25 January 2004. Compare the location, number and extent of houses with the most recent image.

Fig. 2. Google Earth image of Masuh on 25 March 2016.  

Fig. 3. Aerial photograph taken on 28^th September 2016 (APAAME_20160928_RHB-0082)

-DLK

‘View Counts’ on APAAME’s Flickr Site

Since its establishment in 2009, what Flickr calls ‘View Counts’ have reached 7.153 million. After a slow start the number now rises by about a million every few months and the site has 452 ‘Followers’.

A sign of the times is that the all-time most viewed photograph is one of Aleppo, seen 3850 times. Not one taken by our team but the work of No 1 Squadron of the Australian Flying Corps on 23 October 1918 from 7000 feet. It is labelled ‘Aleppo from SW’. The original print is held in The National Archives at Kew in the UK.

The flight – just two and half weeks before the Armistice in Europe, was in the period after the collapse of Ottoman forces in Palestine, Transjordan and southern Syria and 23 days after the Australian Light Horse entered Damascus on 1 October. The photograph is one of several taken by the AFC at that time over Lebanon and Syria (including Damascus on 17 October).

-DLK

APAAME_19181023_TNA_RAFAINN_CN5-2 part2 (193)

Jerash Mausoleum 3D view

David Connolly’s excellent 3D view of one of the large - and seriously endangered, monumental tombs beyond the walls of Roman Gerasa. Photographs are a mixture of his ground photographs and others taken from the air as part of the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project.

Click here to view the Jerash Mausoleum 3D model

He has also made a 3D model of Kh. el-Beddiyeh - an excavated settlement site in the Ajlun Highlands.

Jordan Site by bajr on Sketchfab

Publications - 'Kites in Arabia' iBook now free to download

Back in 2014 we launched an iBook that brought together a lot of our research on Kites (see our blog http://www.apaame.org/2014/09/publications-kites-in-arabia-ibook.html).

The iBook is now FREE TO DOWNLOAD!

You may also be interested in the following:
The Global Kites Project: http://www.globalkites.fr/
Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy Special Issue Desert Kites - Old Structures, New Research: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aae.2015.26.issue-2/issuetoc (Pay Wall)

You can browse thousands of photographs of Kites from Jordan in our archive.

FL201609 - September’s season so far. The Unexpected.

There is no question that the word “unexpected” is the theme of this year’s season, which has been very successful so far.  Unexpected length of annual holidays and holidays for parliamentary elections, and unexpected (and sometimes inexplicable) restrictions on when and where we can fly. None of this is a surprise; after 20 years of working in Jordan the plans we make before we arrive are always changed, but to the eternal credit of the Air Force, pilots and crews, we always achieve the vast majority of what we plan.

Landscape of the Wadi Araba, north of Aqaba. David Kennedy, APAAME_20160918_DLK-0399.

Our opening expedition (18-19 September) was south to Aqaba, but with the unexpected delay following the return to work after the Eid al-Adha, a stronger than expected headwind, and a sick crew man. However despite this we succeeded in flying for over 5 and a half hours, and still had just enough time at the end of the day for a therapeutic swim in the Red Sea, before flying a full four hours back to Amman the following day.

Wadi an Nasifah. Robert Bewley, APAAME_20160919_RHB-0117. 

Expected, but always surprising, is the number and nature of landscapes and sites we photograph. The trip home from Aqaba took us through narrow steep-sided gorges, with strategically located Roman military installations though to dramatic and contrasting geological formations with a variety of prehistoric, Roman and early Islamic sites.

A village on the southern edge of the Ras en-Naqb. Robert Bewley, APAAME_20160919_RHB-0161.

After a brief respite we had two excellent days in the black basalt desert (the Badia) photographing a wide range of sites. The one site that stood out for me - the “Bulls-eye” Cairn. I don’t remember seeing them as clearly defined as those we surveyed this year. The “Bulls-eye” Cairn is another example of just how little we know about the date, distribution or function of many of these sites. However the information we have accumulated means we can start to analyse them, and answer research questions.

A large 'Bulls-eye' cairn with tail, known also as a 'Pendant'. Robert Bewley, APAAME_20160922_RHB-0538.

As with the work of the National Mapping Programme in England, the contribution of aerial survey and interpretation has been to expand our understanding of the size and nature of the past human populations. Seeing the density of stone structures of all types, representing settlements, hunting sites, and burials, has to mean that in the majority of prehistory there were a sizeable human population in the badia desert region of Jordan. An area, until recently, which has been ignored by archaeologists, looking for richer pickings in the so-called Fertile Crescent; thankfully this is changing and there a number of expeditions working in this region to discover the nature of the sites, their date and function. You can see an example of the contribution of aerial survey in the Badia in this article about Bernd Müller-Neuhof's research: 6,000-year-old Fortresses Found in Jordan Show Surprisingly Advanced Early Society.

Concentration of features on the summit of 'Tell el-Ghusein'. Robert Bewley, APAAME_20160922_RHB-0604. 

It is always an exciting event to be flying in the rift valley along the shores of the Dead Sea, where our fifth flight was located. I don’t usually have the time or inclination to check the altimeter on the GPS but for some reason I clicked on it as we descended from 5,000 ft amsl (above mean sea level) to minus 500 ft, below it.

Our GPS reading -194 feet below mean sea level.

Most fittingly, we were flying over the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth. This, of course, should be impossible without going under water, but as it is a “mean sea level” which gives us our height, there has to be exceptions. The Dead Sea area as the lowest point on earth (not under water) is one such exception, so we had the unexpected pleasure of flying along at minus 500ft, with the door open and a wonderful (warm) view of this part of the great rift valley.

View of the Rift Valley. Rebecca Banks, APAAME_20160927_REB-0072.

We were also, unexpectedly, approached by a journalist from Associated Press (AP), based in Amman. He has interviewed both David Kennedy and I, and I took him flying for a short trip to show the preparation and process of aerial survey. We look forward to seeing his short film in due course. On this short flight we also had (pre take-off) the unexpected pleasure of a flat battery in the helicopter; external power was wheeled in and we were on our way without much delay.

We are now using a different helicopter, no longer the Huey, but now the Eurocopter or ‘EC’. This has meant getting to know a new squadron, and new pilots. Each day it is a new crew. Sitting having tea after one sortie, high up in the control tower of one of airbases the Captain unexpectedly asked me, slightly reluctantly, “Why are you doing this work?” Behind the question (given a certain lack of interest up to that point) was the inference “it seems to be a complete waste of time.” I explained our reasons, - discovering sites, monitoring change and damage, and making a photographic record. On the next sortie he was able to the see sites in a new light and his orbiting was much more precise. Unfortunately we had another 4 hours of flying and by the end of it the crew were exhausted (as were we) and any positive feelings to archaeology were forgotten for the day.

We have had enthusiastic crew members taking pictures out of the window of archaeological sites and the beautiful Jordanian landscape (and maybe their home villages), but also unexpectedly many, many photographs on the ground, including “selfies.” I am not an enthusiast of the “selfie” phenomenon. I have been surprised by the sophistication of the “selfie world” with extending selfie sticks, the use of sun and shade, and location: a selfie with the helicopter in the background must clearly carry some weight in the purpose for which these photographs are taken (if indeed there is one). Who knows, one day we might even have a selfie album on APAAME, but I hope not.

The dreaded 'selfie stick'.

Unexpectedly our own health came into play to a greater degree than ever before. Aerial reconnaissance requires strength of both body and mind. The weaker either one of those is the stronger the other has to be. It is rare, here, to have full strength in both, either through lack of sleep (dogs barking in the night, the 0400 call to prayer all contributing to short nights) or the after effect of something we’ve eaten, having a devastating effect on one’s digestion. Each member of the team has succumbed, one way or another, to a bug. This has never happened before and we hope for all our sakes it doesn’t happen again.  Fortunately, so far, it has not affected the performance of our well planned (with unexpected changes) flying and making new discoveries.

Less than a week to go, so let us hope for less of the unexpected.

Bob Bewley

28th September 2016

Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds

The British Museum is hosting a superb exhibition about the history, re-discovery and underwater excavation of the two submerged sites of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus in the delta of the Nile. Well-worth a visit if you can or at least via one of the books, DVDs and other media the museum offers. Happily, it begins by explaining that the re-discovery of the two cities – known of but not previously located, was by Group Captain Cull, CO of the local RAF base, flying over the bay in 1933, spotting and photographing dark objects under the water and bringing them to the attention of the authorities who mounted a brief sortie which brought up a head of Alexander the Great.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/sunken_cities.aspx

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-3539616/Secrets-sunken-city-RAF-pilot-ancient-metropolis-sea-Egypt-brought-British-Museum-new-blockbuster-exhibition.html

Early Turkish Aviation – and Disaster

Following the successful French-organized staged flights from Paris to Cairo in late 1913 (see posts on this Blog of 31 July and 12 and 13 August 2015), the Turkish military planned their own display of aviation prowess. Military aircraft were to fly from Constantinople to Cairo, across Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. They set off on 8 February 1914. One aircraft crashed on the Golan Heights killing both the crew. The second crashed into the sea off Jaffa killing one of the crew. All were buried in Damascus and a monument was erected near the Sea of Galilee. In Constantinople a second monument was set up - inaugurated in 1916, dedicated to these ‘martyrs’ as they were designated. It is in a park in front of the former City Hall.

Aviators' Monument Istanbul. Photographer: David L. Kennedy. APAAMEG_20160609_DLK-0083.

The broken marble column has two brass plates attached, one with the names of the dead. The second plate depicts an aircraft, a mosque (Suleymaniye?), the monumental entrance to Istanbul University, the nearby Beyazit Tower (then part of the Ministry of War) and the two pyramids in Egypt.

Aviators' Monument Istanbul. Photographer: David L. Kennedy. APAAMEG_20160611_DLK-0066 (Cropped)

- DLK

AAJ May 2016 - Highs, Lows, and Goodbyes to the Hueys

When we are in Jordan we will squeeze in any opportunity to fly, but this year it was particularly important to do a few flights as we have sadly lost the use of the wonderful beast of helicoptering - the Huey, and we had to test our new machines and pilots of the Eurocopters.

One of the RJAF Hueys in flight during the 2010 season. Photographer: Don Boyer. APAAME_20101016_DDB-0045.

The Huey has been our principal form of aerial reconnaissance since the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project started in 1997. The advantages of the Huey were its spacious interior, large opening (once the door was open) and outward facing seats that allowed four photographers to operate together. Given these machines had been in operation during the Vietnam War (see our blog 'I Love the Smell of Nabataea in the Morning'), and one had a bullet hole to prove it, we knew we would have to move on eventually. They had their quirks, like the communication systems being flakey, shaking you about so that you could feel the movement for several hours after landing, and the noise! We felt a pang of grief for the loss of a trusted friend that had transported us over the varied sites and landscapes of Jordan. If anyone has a few million pounds to service a small fleet of Hueys for us, I am sure we could make good use of it!

FL20160529 - Low clouds over the Kerak Plateau

Aiming for a 7 o’clock take off we left CBRL at 0630, Andrea and I, with the sun rising and some clouds in the west. As we crossed the Hejaz railway en route to Marka we were overtaken by the Squadron Commander, who waved and we followed him; I was wondering which gate to the air base he’d use (as there is more than one). Every year we have gone through a ritual at the gate where the guards don’t have a clue who we are, despite assurances the previous day that the guards have been informed. Today we followed him through a gate we knew existed but have never used; this is the gate where we have been supposed to enter - the gate where the guards have been forewarned each day (by the squadron commanders) prior to arrival. As it was our last day of the season we will not know if we will have “cracked” the gate until September, when we hope to return.

The Madaba Martyrs Church, section of Roman Road and the 'Burnt Palace'. Photographer: Robert Bewley. APAAME_20160529_RHB-0017.

Flight 20160526 - East into the Badia

The second flight of the 2016 season saw Becc and I heading east to the Azraq area, taking in Qasr Aseikhim, a wonderful and significant multi period hilltop site but which is suffering badly from the bulldozer as access roads make it more accessible.

Qasr Aseikhim showing signs of damage from bulldozing. Photographer: Rebecca Banks. APAAME_20160526_REB-0132.

We then headed to assess the impact of the construction of the Azraq by-pass on the stone built structures on the Harrat al-‘Uwaynid. It was truly depressing seeing what had been destroyed without thorough investigations (a presentation at ICHAJ13 by Romel Garib said a survey had been conducted with the help of Prof. Gary Rollefson, but no excavation); truly a missed opportunity as the area is rich in kite-sites, wheels, and pendants (one of which we have been monitoring and has had its tail smashed through – seemingly unnecessarily). These sites are representative of this part of the basalt plateau, and we know so little about them.

FL20160523 - Clouds in the North

The Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project has just begun its 20th season (after David’s flight in 1997) and it coincides with ICHAJ13- a conference to celebrate and be informed of recent archaeological work in Jordan. Balancing the commitments of the conference with trying to fly was always going to be tricky but the opportunity to undertake aerial surveys should never be missed, especially in this region.

Jordan Valley near Pella. Low cloud made visibility and photography not ideal. Photographer: Robert Bewley. APAAME_20160523_RHB-0219.

Jordan never ceases to surprise, and this year has seen the demise of the Air Force’s Huey helicopters, which we had come to love – despite their the noise, and discomfort too, but also great space and views with the door open, and relatively slow speed. So, this first fight (Andrea Zerbini and I) was also experimental in learning the art of aerial photography in a new machine – the Eurocopter (or EC 635).

Kh. el-Musheirfeh and MEGA-Jordan

The Jordanian village of Kh. el-Musheirfeh lies about 4 km southwest of the major Nabataean/ Roman/ Early Islamic village/ fort/ town of Umm er-Resas. A further 4 km south is the major archaeological site of Lehun on the rim of the great trough of the Wadi Mujib.

The published literature on the site is limited and the two entries in JADIS and now in MEGA-Jordan are confused, confusing and incomplete.

‘MEGA-J 12338 Musheirifa (sic)’ locates a ‘site’ on the south side of the modern village but that turns out to be only the modern village itself.

‘MEGA-J 12349 Musheirfeh (sic)’ is located 2.5 km to the northeast of the village but in an open area with no traces of any archaeological features.

Surprisingly, therefore, the record reports material of several periods - Nabataean, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Modern, and lists eight ‘Site Elements’ including a village, cistern, a bas relief and sherd scatters of the periods noted. The source of the information is given in two published references from the 1930s (Glueck and Savignac, below). A brief glance at these two publications confirms the obvious – there is just one site and it lies under and around the modern village. The second MEGA-J entry (12349) should be deleted and the information there should be transferred to the first entry (12338) under that spelling (as on the 1:50,000 map).

Musheirfeh is in fact an important site as the two published reports show. Glueck was there on 2 June 1933; Savignac in late April 1935. The latter knows of Glueck’s first major report on his survey which included this site but – inexplicably, does not refer to what he had published. i.e. the two reports are effectively independent of one another. Putting the two reports together allows a composite picture which can be considerably enhanced and developed by analysis of the satellite imagery on Google Earth and Bing, by interpretation of the survey aerial photographs of 1953 and the recent low-level aerial photographs taken by the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project, all of which are in the APAAME archive.

Preflight work flow – AAJ May 2016

Our bags are packed, flights booked and we’ll be landing in Amman soon for this our 20th year of flying in Jordan (the first season was way back in 1997)!

This May will see a short series of flights, hopefully three in total – one to the north and along the Jordan Valley, one to the East into the Badia, and one to the south concentrating on the fertile Kerak Plateau.

We will also be attending the International Conference of the History and Archaeology of Jordan and look forward to seeing excellent presentations on the projects and research occurring. You can find the program on the conference website http://ichaj.org/

See you in the air!

Publications (Correction): Pioneers Above Jordan

It has just come to our attention that the article

David Kennedy 2012 'Pioneers Above Jordan: revealing a prehistoric landscape', Antiquity 86 (332): 474-491.

contains an error for the image and caption of figure 10.

The image in the text is the following:

Ausaji Kite 28. Photographer: David Kennedy (APAAME_20091008_DLK-0167).

The caption should identify the site as 'Ausaji Kite 28'.

The caption in the published text is that for the following image:

Wisad Kite 14. Photographer: Robert Bewley (APAAME_20091004_RHB-0073).

The caption from the article reads as follows:

Wisad Kite 14 (APAAME 20091004 RHB-0073). A kite surrounded by an immense tangle of walls, few of them visible at ground level. In the top left is the Wisad Police Post on the Airmail Track.

Publications: Khatt Shebib

The Khatt Shebib. Photographer: Robert Bewley (APAAME_20051002_RHB-0069).

Recently the academic journal Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie published our article on the wall feature in Jordan known as the 'Khatt Shebib'. The content of this article was recently reported on by Owen Jarus in the online science website 'LiveScience' - '93-Mile-Long Ancient Wall in Jordan Puzzles Archaeologists'. 

The LiveScience feature has led to other media taking up the story. 

The feature was investigated remotely in the course of the active aerial reconnaissance program - the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project, as well as visited on the ground. The study utilised historical imagery (mainly 1953) and maps, as well as several archaeological survey reports conducted on different sections of the wall, notably those directed by B. MacDonald (Wadi el-Hasa, Tafila to Busayra, and Ayl to Ras an-Naqab Archaeological Surveys), F. Abudanh (in the region of Udruh) and G. Findlater (the Dana Archaeological Survey).

You can find the tagged images of the Khatt Shebib on our Flickr page by following this link.

The synthesis of the information gathered has potentially raised more questions than those that we were able to answer, and we hope this study will soon be followed up by a comprehensive ground investigation of the entire feature and sites directly associated with it which may be dateable.

David Kennedy & Rebecca Banks 2015. 'The Khatt Shebib in Jordan: From the Air and Space', Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie 8: 132-154.

Jordan Times article reports damage to the Via Nova Traiana

Ammar Khammash recently wrote an opinion piece in The Jordan Times regarding damage to a major monument in Jordan from the Roman period - The Via Nova Traiana ('Ancient Rome Reawakened', The Jordan Times, 27 December 2015: http://www.jordantimes.com/opinion/ammar-khammash/ancient-rome-reawakened).

This great Roman highway was constructed soon after the annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106 and – as some of its milestones declare, Rome – under the Emperor Trajan, had ‘redacta in formam provinciae Arabia viam novam a finibus Syriae usque ad Mare Rubrum” (“turned Arabia into provincial form and built a new road from the boundaries of Syria as far as the Red Sea”). Hence the modern description of it as the Via Nova Traiana.

A stretch of the Via Nova Traiana near Umm el-Jimal. APAAME_20060911_DLK-0290. Photographer: David Kennedy.

The road begins at Bostra in southern Syria then traverses Jordan from west of Umm el-Jimal in the north to Aqaba in the south. Though it bears the name of the Emperor Trajan, it is generally thought the road made use of earlier thoroughfares through the landscape, and its milestones are testament that it continued to be used well after, to the extent that sections of it are beside or underneath modern stretches of road. Well-preserved sections of the ancient road are increasingly difficult to find as development in Jordan continues at speed with the many pressures of increased demographics and modern infrastructure. In some places the road can be found complete with its paved substructure, in others only a side kerb of stones survives and paving may have never been laid; many sections are completely lost.

Due to his previous research regarding the course of the road through the landscape, Khammash reports that he met the news of the new wind farm in the Tafila Governorate with trepidation, and his visitation to the area confirmed his fears. He found that the road was cut in several places by the earthworks, platforms and access roads for the network of towers.

Khammash specifically reports that the Via Nova Traiana is directly intersected by the construction of turbine WTG 32. The Final Report for the proposed wind farm states that 'No Archaeological Remains' were found at this location (Table 13-2). Khammash also reports intersections or cuts in the vicinity of turbines WTG 26, 29 and 38. The first of these is also reported as having 'No Archaeological Remains' while the other two locations are from relocations to avoid other archaeological sites.

By chance, the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan Project flew in the vicinity of the wind farm in transit to and from sites planned for the 5th flight of its 2015 season. Dr Robert Bewley captured the site of Kh. ad-Dabbah (JADIS:2101035; MEGA-J:4804) in passing. What you can just see in the image is the traces of the Via Nova Traiana extending from the right of the site of Kh. ad-Dabbah in the foreground to the platform of the wind farm in the middle distance.

Kh. ad-Dabbah and Tafila Wind Farm. APAAME_20151013_RHB-0167. Click to see enlarged image.

The Final Report documents that of the proposed 38 locations for wind turbines, 16 were changed due to concern for archaeological material (Table 13-2). Consultations and site visits through April until September of 2012 are listed in the documentation (Tafila Wind Farm Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, Stakeholder Engagement Plan, Table 3-1). Nowhere in the documentation is knowledge of a Roman road mentioned.

The Executive Summary for the then proposed wind farm states:

"...Where historical monuments were found, the locations of the turbines and the roads were revised. 

Even though the wind farm is planned in such a way that no historical artifacts are impacted, excavation works during the project construction might reveal further archaeological remains. Thus every effort must be made during construction to prevent damages on any findings."

Tafila Energy Project, Tafila Goverorate (Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) Executive Summary, Report No. 11-1-3058f, CUBE Engineering GmbH, Al-Rawabi Environment & Energy Consultancies, 20th December 2012: 9.

The literature survey may perhaps be indicative of how the knowledge of the major Roman Road did not come to mind of the surveyors: two of the major archaeological surveys conducted in the area are not mentioned in the documentation - The Tafila-Busayra Archaeological Survey and the Dana Archaeological Survey as well as a survey conducted by Prof. Zbigniew Fiema which exists as a report in the Department of Antiquities. Also of note is that nowhere could I find in the assessment documentation reference to the current SMR for Jordan - MEGA-J, only its outdated predecessor, JADIS.

No comprehensive map of the distribution of these sites over the extent of the proposed wind farm is provided despite mention in passing in the Environmental and Social Mitigation Plan of numerous archaeological sites over the proposed area, a conducted survey, and consultation of aerial map surveys and experts in the field (Section 11.1). This is despite profuse inclusion of other GIS analyses in the project assessment, including a distribution of the 'best known' archaeological sites in the region which were assessed for indirect impacts.

It is clear that this international funded project for renewable energy in Jordan has done an assessment of the direct and indirect impacts of the project on the archaeological landscape and made alterations to their plans to best accommodate what they knew of the archaeological and heritage environment. So how did the major thoroughfare of this part of the Roman Empire escape inclusion in their assessments?

Is it simply a case that something as slight as a row of kerb stones was overlooked, or not considered substantive enough to warrant remark? An act of unconscious archaeological snobbery where a built structure is considered but a surface feature is dismissed? The reports do not tell us if the road was successfully investigated if it was discovered over the course of the construction of the wind farm. The Environmental and Social Mitigation Plan implies that his would be the case, and we for one hope there is an archaeological report on the excavation of a section of the Via Nova Traiana forthcoming. If not, we join Ammar Khammash in hoping that this destruction may highlight the importance of documenting and preserving where possible what is left of this ancient monument.

All assessment documents for the Tafila Wind Project were accessed through the International Finance Corporation website:
Tafila Wind Environmental and Social Review Summary, http://ifcext.ifc.org/ifcext/spiwebsite1.nsf/vwAllDocumentsByUNID_NL/1E151BC4ED5004B885257AF7006F1151?opendocument, accessed 5 January 2016. Hyperlinks have been provided throughout the text.

Aerial Archaeology in Jordan Project's images of the wind farm taken in 2015 can be found on the APAAME Flickr page. Other numerous aerial (and a number of ground) photographs of other stretches of the Via Nova and sites along its length can be found on the Flickr web site for APAAME by searching for “Via Nova Traiana” or “VNT”.

Published surveys mentioned in this text:
Findlater, George Macrae. 2003. Imperial control in Roman and Byzantine Arabia: a landscape interpretation of archaeological evidence in southern Jordan, PhD Thesis The University of Edinburgh: Appendix 1 Gazetteer of Archaeological Sites of the Dana Archaeological Survey.
MacDonald, B., Herr, L.G., Neeley, M.P., Gagos, T., Moumani, K., and Rockman M. 2004. The Tafila-Busayra Archaeological Survey 1999-2001, West-Central Jordan, American Schools of Oriental Research, Boston, MA.