Publications: Settlement and Soldiers in the Roman Near East

Ashgate Publishing contacted us last year regarding publishing a compilation of David Kennedy's past papers in a 'Variorum' volume. The unifying theme of this collection is Settlement and Soldiers in the Roman Near East, and the final result is a compilation of thirteen papers originally published in different sources from 1980 through to 2006. The volume includes a Preface, Addenda and Index for the included papers, as well as all images from the original papers.

David Kennedy

Settlement and Soldiers in the Roman Near East

Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS 1032 

Ashgate Publishing

2013

ISBN: 9781409464365

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409464365
Hardback, 300 pages
66 black and white illustrations
244 x 169 mm format
Contents
Preface



From the Ashgate website:
The Roman Near East has been a source of fascination and exasperation - an immense area, a rich archaeological heritage as well as documents in several local languages, a region with a great depth of urbanisation and development … yet relatively neglected by modern researchers and difficult to work on and in. Local archaeologists are often under-funded and the Roman period viewed as an earlier phase of western colonialism.

Happily, the immense surge in archaeological and historical research on the Roman period everywhere has included the Roman Near East and there have been significant academic developments.

This collection of studies on the Roman Near East represents Professor Kennedy’s academic assessment of the region, which began with his doctoral thesis on the contribution of Syria to the Roman army. Although the thesis was never published, several articles owe their genesis to work done then or soon after and are included here (VI, VII, IX, XII). Initial visits to military sites in Syria and Jordan swiftly brought out the presence in many cases of associated civil settlements and - though often now gone, the traces of ancient field systems. Hence, the two prominent sub-themes in this collection are the Roman military and various aspects of society and settlement - settlement types, farming, logistical underpinning and communications.

Publications - Historical Aerial Imagery in Jordan and the Wider Middle East

Hot off the press!
Robert Bewley and David L. Kennedy, 2013, 'Historical Aerial Imagery in Jordan and the Wider Middle East' pp. 221-242 in: William S. Hanson and Iona A. Oltean (eds) Archaeology from Historical Aerial and Satellite Archives, Springer: New York/Heidelberg/Dordrecht/London.
ISBN: 978-1-4614-4504-3

The book or eBook can be purchased from the Springer website: http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/anthropology+%26+archaeology/book/978-1-4614-4504-3

Publications- Bulletins

Bit of a catch up on some bulletins from the last few months:


Bob Bewley with David Kennedy, Mat Dalton & Rebecca Banks, 'Aerial Archaeology in Jordan: 2010-2012', Aerial Archaeology Research Group News, Vol. 45, September 2012: 74-81.
Available to members from their website.

Fiona Baker & David L. Kennedy 'Jarash Hinterland Survey' in: Keller, Porter & Tuttle, 'Newsletter: Archaeology in Jordan, 2010 and 2011 Seasons', American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 116, No. 4, October 2012: 702-703.

David Kennedy & Bob Bewley, 'The Harret al-Shaam, from Air and Space' in: 'Long-term Landscape Environment and Climate Change Studies, from the Past through to Predictive Models for  Future Developments', Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant, Vol. 7, No. 1, October 2012: 60-62.
Available through IngentaConnect.

Publications: Pioneers above Jordan

David L. Kennedy 2012 'Pioneers above Jordan: revealing a prehistoric landscape', Antiquity 86: 474-491.

Percy Maitland (centre) in Iraq c.1925 (Maitland Family Collection).

Aerial photography is so fundamental an instrument of modern archaeology that we often take it for granted. But its methods are surprisingly specific and its most important experimental theatre was probably the territory of the Levant—and especially the rocky terrain of Jordan. The author, a prominent aerial archaeologist of our own day, takes time off to review the achievements of the pioneers, serving officers who established routes over the desert to deliver mail between Egypt and Iraq. The fabulous ancient landscape they discovered could only be appreciated through the lowlevel window provided by these slow-moving rickety machines and their intrepid pilots. In these days of jet travel, the precious basalt landscape is in danger of slipping off the agenda again—both for researchers and conservers.

Full text: Antiquity.co.uk

Jarash Hinterland Survey 2010

A short report on the final season of the Jarash Hinterland Survey (2010) co-directed by Fiona Baker and David Kennedy can be found at the great Past Horizons website.

"It is all too easy to get distracted from the survey by kind offers of tea, but as always local knowledge is gained as a result. For instance, to be informed that a tomb containing about twenty sarcophagi on Abu Suwan had been used as a bomb shelter in 1973 and had subsequently been filled in leaving no visible trace represented a great result. The route of a Classical water course in the Wadi Deir – now scattered and bulldozed – was shown to us by a man who played in it as a child. An intense artefact scatter also got us excited, only to be told to our disappointment that it had been deposited by trucks moving earth from elsewhere in the preceding few months."

An overview of the 2010 season appears in ADAJ Vol 55, 2011.