Roman Archaeology Group Free Lectures: Saturday, 8th February.

The Roman Archaeology Group has arranged for two illustrated lectures to be presented on Saturday, 8th February. All are welcome.

2 Free Illustrated Lectures on: The Emperor Justinian and Petra, Jordan.
Saturday, 8th February 2014.

1:30pm: "Justinian's Empire" presented by Dr. Michael Champion.

2:30pm: Afternoon Tea.

3:00pm: "Western Travellers to Petra in the 19th Century" presented by W/Prof. David Kennedy.

N.B. Lectures are FREE, however there is a small charge for the refreshments served at the mid-session break: $7pp (RAG members) / $10pp (non-members)

Booking for catering purposes is ESSENTIAL.
Please RSVP by Wednesday 5th February to Norah by telephone 9281 4613 or by email: coopsathome@optusnet.com.au

For more details please see the events page of the Roman Archaeology Group blog here.

Website: Monuments of Syria

http://monumentsofsyria.com/

The eyes of the world seem fixed on Syria presently, it is a tragedy that it could not be for different reasons than those of the conflict currently destabilising the lives of so many.

Ross Burns, author of 'Monuments of Syria' and 'Damascus- a history', has recently launched an accompanying website to his published work on Syria. 'Monuments of Syria' provides an index of historical places and sites with photographs. It provides a valuable insight to many sites of historical interest that few currently are able to visit. Here, so many periods, civilisations and faiths are represented.

"Few countries can match Syria in the richness of its historical remains. In the zone west of Aleppo, for example, over 600 Byzantine-era villages survive, often with multiple churches with walls up to their rooflines. There is practically no era not represented in Syria. Palmyra, the great caravan city at the westernmost point of the Silk Road, still slumbers in the desert, its beautifully carved limestone as crisp and dramatic as 2000 years ago. Magnificent reminders of the folly of past confrontations, including the Crusades, survive in the great fortifications that are scattered across the country — the Krak des Chevaliers; the great Islamic citadel that crowns Aleppo; the refuges of the ‘Assassins’ hidden away in the coastal mountains; or the Damascus Citadel that sustained the long Muslim resistance to the Crusades. Not to be overlooked are the many mosques and madrasas, often tucked away quietly in backstreets or buried within the busy suqs (markets) of the major centres."

Through efforts like this much knowledge is kept alive, for Syrians and the world alike. Hopefully when the spectre of war departs from the land the corpus will be expanded and studied further.
Visit http://monumentsofsyria.com/

Flickr Archive: Search issues

Users of our archive hosted on Flickr may have noticed that the interface has gone through some changes recently. Unfortunately this has included what seems a serious glitch in the search tool- basically that you may not get any results at all even if a photograph is named exactly with what you search for (such as 'Umm es-Surab' as I recently found).

My basic experimentation with the problem indicates that a search will find items 'tagged' with the search terms, but not if they are named with that term. If you are having trouble finding a site as a temporary solution I advise that people search for photographs of their site using the georeferenced search tool at www.flickr.com/apaame/map
You can find instructions on how to do this on our YouTube channel: http://youtu.be/rFEF4Vjdo00
If you still have difficulty finding your site, please contact us directly.

Thank you for your patience as we adjust the archive to the changes occurring on the Flickr interface.

The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia

Inscription in the vicinity of the Cairn of Hani, Jordan. Photograph: David L. Kennedy, APAAMEG_20091014_DLK-0017.

This week APAAME has made over 200 ground photographs available to the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (formerly the Safaitic Database Online) for inclusion in their database. The photographs were originally taken during follow up ground visits to sites after they had been photographed from the air. The majority of the photographs were taken in the 'Black Desert' or Harret al-Shaam in Jordan and many of the inscriptions were associated with features we were interested in, such as Wheels, Pendants and Cairns. As the APAAME team are not experts in Safaitic or Hismaic, let alone Dadanitic or Taymanitic, we are enthusiastic that these photographs will be made available in a database designed for their study.

For more information on the inscription database please see the passage below made available to us from the project, or visit the project website HERE.

If you wish to see some of the many photographs of inscriptions we have taken, please visit our Flickr site where we have tagged the majority with 'inscription': http://www.flickr.com/photos/apaame/tags/inscription/.

OCIANA (Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia)

From the early first millennium BC to around the fourth century AD, literacy was extremely widespread among both the settled and nomadic populations of the Arabian Peninsula and they have left us tens of thousands of inscriptions and graffiti. Since the late nineteenth century, approximately 48,000 of these have been recorded by travellers and scholars and have appeared in hundreds of articles, books, and unpublished dissertations in a number of different languages. This makes it extremely difficult for all but a handful of specialists to keep track of and use the rich material they contain. Moreover, any visit to the deserts of southern Syria, eastern and southern Jordan and the western two-thirds of Saudi Arabia reveals that there are thousands more inscriptions waiting to be recorded.

The OCIANA project, is based at the Khalili Research Centre, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and directed by Professor Jeremy Johns and Michael Macdonald. It will create an online Corpus of all the pre-Islamic inscriptions of north and central Arabia, both those in the various Ancient North Arabian dialects and scripts, and those in Old (i.e. pre-Islamic) Arabic. A project at the University of Pisa (the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions, DASI) is producing an online corpus of the inscriptions of pre-Islamic South Arabia, and the two projects are working closely together so that it will be possible to search the information in both corpora through the same portal.

In 2012, the first phase of OCIANA, funded by a grant from the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford, launched a demonstration site in which a corpus of 3420 previously unpublished Safaitic inscriptions was made available online with readings, translations, commentaries, ancillary information, tracings, and photographs (see http://www.ociana.org.uk). In January 2013, the project received a large grant from the AHRC for Phase II which will last three and a half years from 1st October 2013. In this phase, the Dadanitic, Taymanitic, the rest of the Safaitic, Hismaic, and Old Arabic inscriptions will be entered and tagged, with all available ancillary information and with photographs whenever these are available. Phase III will see the entry of all the approximately 13,000 Thamudic inscriptions.

Seminar: David Kennedy. “Al-Muwaqqar. Salvaging an Umayyad Desert Castle and its Context”

On our recent fieldwork in Jordan in April we paid particular attention to the Umayyad site of al-Muwaqqar on the fringe of the steppe east of Amman (see our blog entry: Flight 20130414, Field Trip 20130416 - al-Muwaqqar). Our interest has only increased with subsequent detailed examination of previous travellers’ and archaeologists’ reports, photographs and drawings of the site – the first date to the late 19th century include John Gray Hill and his wife Caroline, Rudolf-Ernst Brünnow and Alois Musil. Later accounts include the better-known publications on the distinctive capitals by R. W. Hamilton, and K. A. C. Creswell, author of Early Islamic Architecture (1969) as well as the lesser-known excavation reports published in the Jordan Department of Antiquities Journal, ADAJ. In addition to this there are historical aerial photographs of 1939 and 1948, and our own photographs of the site dating 1998-2013. Piecing together these accounts with the surviving visible record has led to an impressive picture of a complex Umayyad site comprising of at least 2 reservoirs, c. 90 cisterns, a large Qasr or palatial residence, a second structure of unknown function, and what may be an associated bath-house with mosaics.

A brief summation of our investigations were presented today at St. John’s College, Oxford at one of the weekly ‘Late Antique and Byzantine Archaeology and Art’ Seminars. The lecture was well attended. Positive and informative feedback from peers was most welcome and has given us much food for thought. The resulting publication on this topic is in the works: watch this space.

David Kennedy presents in the New Seminar room at St. John's College, Oxford.

Guest blog: Włodzimierz Rączkowski Qatar Workshop

You may remember earlier this year we conducted an aerial photography workshop at the new UCL Qatar campus with Włodzimierz 'Wlodek' Rączkowski (see DLK's blog here). Wlodek has been kind enough to contribute the following comments, which have now found their way to our blog.

A White Easter! No, that's not a mistake – if you had spent Easter in Poland this year you too would have thought a Christmas tree more suitable and looked for Santa rather than the first spring flowers and chocolate eggs. So this Easter-winter lead me to think about my visit to Qatar back in February. The flowers were blooming and the weather conditions were much more spring-like. A different world altogether.

Why Qatar? It came as quite a surprise. Bob Bewley (UK) and David Kennedy (Australia) together with Lisa Usman from UCL Qatar undertook the initiative to organise a “short course” on aerial archaeology (10-14 February). An exotic subject in an exotic country and I got to go along by chance as a tutor/lecturer. You can read more about the workshops themselves in AARGnews vol. 46 (March 2013), p. 15-18 – The AARG website can be found HERE.

Everything in Qatar was amazing, new, different, unexpected – including the workshop timetable. Is it possible to fit in a bit of rest and relaxation and sightseeing halfway through a series of workshops? Actually yes, it is – for it turned out that Tuesday (12th February) was National Sport Day, a surprise for both the organisers and lecturers. A double surprise in fact – a day of sporting events at a national level (less surprising when you recall that Qatar is due to hold the Football World Cup in 2022 and when you spot the joggers in all their gear along Doha's Corniche or main boulevard) and a public holiday so that everyone can “do a bit of sport”. Well, how to make the most of such a gift?

Qatar isn't a large country but then not all the sights to see are located in Doha. I persuaded Bob and David to take a trip south to Khor Al-Adaid, also known as the “Inland Sea”. It's a large tidal inlet with a convoluted shoreline cutting deeply into the land dividing Qatar from Saudi Arabia. It is connected to the Gulf by a deep, narrow channel. There is no comparable lagoon system of this type known anywhere else in the world. It is a UNESCO nature reserve (see: http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5317/ ). A large system of barchans and parabolic dunes covers flat areas of former marine sediments creating a unique landscape. For those of us from the northern hemisphere (Bob and myself), the yellow sand, turquoise water and blue sky set the perfect scene for a bit of relaxation.

The Inland Sea is not particularly easy to get to. There are no roads leading to it but kilometres of sand dunes to cross. The only option was to hire a car and Bob, after having made a number of phone calls, managed to acquire a 4WD Nissan XTERRA – the best choice of vehicle for a trip across Qatar; ideal that is if one has all the additional equipment (spade, ropes, lots of water) and experience of driving over dunes. It turned out that we had the car... and nothing but the car.

As we approached Masaieed (only about 40 km from Doha) the first impressive dunes could be seen. After that there were no roads or signs to follow, only a general direction of SSW and the tyre tracks of other cars to indicate where we should be going. So when the tracks forked off into two directions, what were we to do? Was this our intended destination? There we were, driving “in the dark” at high noon in a land flooded in sunlight and sand. It was quite busy near Masaieed as there were many places to hire quad-bikes and go scrambling over the dunes. The further S we went, the more deserted it got: fewer people, cars, signs of civilisation. We encountered the odd car or two sporadically (did they know the way better than us? - not too unreasonable an assumption).

After about 2 hours driving, without great misadventure, we made it to our destination – the Inland Sea. Good job we didn't decide to drive up to the waterline (though it was rather tempting) – the sand was really slushy and it was hard to get up to the water's edge even on foot.

And what do Europeans do when they find themselves by the sea, surrounded by sand and blue skies overhead? That's right, they head out for a paddle – and... what a disappointment that was. The temperature of the water was more like the Baltic in the summer (about 17-18 degrees). Brrrrrr! Just a quick dip then.

The suggestion to climb up the nearest dune was outvoted 2:1, so it was time to get ready to head back. One question which arose quite quickly was: do we have enough fuel? Apart from this one concern the journey back went smoothly – up to a point. At 14:02:15 (according to our SatNav) we got stuck in a dune which caught us unawares for this dune was nothing special, just a bit of loose sand. We'd managed to scale much larger dunes before! It turns out that “reading this sandy landscape” is in fact quite an important skill.

So what now – it's no use having a great 4WD drive if you don't have either a spade or ropes. A couple of attempts to move forward/back and... we were chassis-deep in the sand. A few cars drove past but not one stopped, hardly surprising as they were probably tourists. Fortunately for us a “local” spotted us and realising that we were in trouble he offered to help. The first manoeuvres (reversing, letting some air out of the tyres) were unsuccessful. Time for the rope. Luckily, our local hero did have one and easily towed us out of the sand trap. The rest of the journey was uneventful, we did have enough fuel. We had all been so intent on getting out of the sand that not one of us thought to take a photo (photography specialists that we are!).

Extensive stone structures in the shallows near Abu Dhulouf.

And so back to the photography then. When I was travelling around Qatar I thought about the usefulness of aerial photographs in this country, especially in documenting archaeological heritage. I did not see too many opportunities. At least not until after the workshops when I went north to the area around Abu Dhulouf. It was low tide, so there was no chance of swimming but it was possible to go wading ankle-deep in water across the sandy expanse. I observed extensive stones structures – low walls stretching for kilometres. It was impossible to capture their spatial structure. I imagine they were fish-traps, or perhaps an area for hunting birds. I have no doubt that aerial photographs would be the perfect method for documentation and mapping. Shortly after take-off from Doha I noticed a similar though smaller stone structure. There's my reason to return!

Research: Harrat Khaybar

For quite some time now I have been working on a large group of kites we found in a high resolution window in Google Earth around the ancient oasis and site of Khaybar. The huge concentration of kites fascinated us, so we have been conducting a comprehensive study and gathering data on the kites. This has included taking measurements, mapping, drawing and creating typologies.

While I have been working away I have constantly been struck by the ‘grass is always greener’ mentality, and wondered what lay behind the fuzzy pixels of the lower resolution imagery around my high resolution window in Google Earth. Well, that was answered for me today by Bing maps. My window has been completely blown open, and though for brevity and time’s sake I shall no doubt have to limit my study to the original window in Google Earth, the additional information provided by the larger context is incredibly helpful.

Firstly, I can confirm my suspicions of patterns:– the amazing series of kites that almost appear strung together by their tails that are located to the east of Khaybar have sister strings to the south of the high resolution window.

A string of Kites from east of Khaybar (drawn: Rebecca Banks).

Secondly, a report with accompanying photography by M. John Roobol and Victor E. Camp in their ‘Explanatory Notes to the Geologic Map of the Cenozoic Lava Fields of Harrats Khaybar, Ithnayn, and Kura, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’ (1991) that showed what appeared to be a Kite stratified underneath a tongue of Pahoehoe lava of the Habir flow could be identified in the satellite imagery. The area reveals at least one Kite partly overlain by the lava flow – and several other stone structures as well. The Habir flow is ‘historic’ but the exact date is unknown – the eruption date could be anything between the 1st century AD and 1800 (Roobol & Camp: 23).