Kites, Tombs, and Houses in the 'Land of Conjecture:' New Discoveries in the Black Desert, Jordan
Yorke Rowan
Senior Research Associate in Ancient Studies
Oriental Institute
Wednesday
January 10, 2018
7:00 pm
Breasted Hall of the Oriental Institute
Free and open to the public
The eastern panhandle of Jordan includes the Black Desert, a harsh, basalt-strewn region with a single asphalt road and few water sources. Few archaeological research projects operated in the region with the exception of pioneering investigations by Betts and Helms in the 1970s and 1980s. With the initiation of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project in 2008, we began to recognize that thousands of structures, previously unknown, undated, and of unknown function, clustered on the landscape. In this talk, Yorke Rowan discusses recent discoveries of tombs, petroglyphs, well-built houses, and vast chains of hunting traps across the landscape, all of which suggest the environment as quite different to what we see now.
