Abstract
During research at Umm el-Jimal, northern Jordan, on the history of the community’s relationship to the ancient site, an intriguing question keeps surfacing: How can the recently ‘arrived/settled’ community legitimize its relationship with antiquities which are not an essential component of their own historical experience? This question is somewhat different from the issue of estrangement of the living present from the archaeological past, about which some of us have written in the tradition of Edward Said’s orientalist critique. The author expects the answers to the above question to redirect our approach from the more negatively critical, ‘Why “they” were excluded’, to a more positively assertive, ‘Why they should be included’. One of the key theses of the chapter is that an essential way of making this right of inclusion meaningful to the modern community is the coupling of the archaeological heritage – pre-Islamic and Islamic – to the deep Islamic literary and artistic heritage in Jordanian education.
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Notes
- 1.
For current research of the Umm el-Jimal Archaeological Project (UJAP) see de Vries et al. (2016). UJAP conducted traditional archaeology at Umm el-Jimal sporadically from 1972–1998 and architectural conservation from 1983. From 2007 onwards, UJAP has concentrated on site documentation, preservation and presentation with community archaeology as the overriding goal. UJAP is lodged at Calvin University, partnered with the Department of Antiquities and Ministry of Tourism of Jordan, affiliated with ACOR (American Center of Research in Amman) and ASOR (American Schools of Oriental Research in North America), and works in close cooperation with the community and Municipality of Umm el-Jimal for the development of local cultural-economic resources. UJAP enables research and publication for project participants from Jordanian, American and international academies. Since 2007, UJAP’s support has come from Calvin University, the American Institute of Archaeology, NORAD/NORHED (Norway), the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (USA), USAID/SCHEP (see below), UNESCO, Al Hima (Jordan), Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Germany), the Pax Foundation (Nevada), the Clean Water Institute of Calvin University (CWICU), ACOR and private donors.
- 2.
Between 1871 and 1880 about 800 Christians from Kerak resettled previously deserted Madaba to escape from a tribal feud (Harrison, in preparation; Tristram, 1874, p. 81).
- 3.
Umm Sayhoun was pre-planned and built by the Jordanian Government to accommodate the Bedul residents when the authorities forbad their residing within the antiquities of Petra. They moved reluctantly between 1985 and 1990 (Brand, 2001).
- 4.
In Jordan, the universally told myth is that when their army withdrew from the region at the end of World War I, the Turks buried their gold in thirty chests. At just about every village in Jordan, including Umm al-Jimal, some people are convinced that this gold is buried in their ruins. Many supplant their dream for the ‘gold’ with digging for artifacts like pots, which they attempt sell on the antiquities market. In this they mimic archaeologists and sometimes even leave very professional looking trenches. Kersel (2020) provides a study of this phenomenon in Jordan.
- 5.
Bilad ash-Sham is essentially the northern lands of Arabia, today encompassing Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan, as distinct from the Bilad al-Yaman, the southern lands of Arabia today encompassing Yemen, Oman and parts of Saudi Arabia. The geographic point of view is from Baghdad in the Abbasid period, when Bilad ash-Sham was a formally named province of the empire. Later it became the northern portion of the Mamluk state centered on Damascus (ash-Sham), as distinct from the Egyptian half, centered on Cairo. It is coterminous with al-mashreq, the territory on the east end of the Mediterranean without Iraq, and overlaps with but is not identical to the Levant or Greater Syria.
- 6.
The King of Jordan retains the custodianship of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, including Haram Sharif. This is a legacy from Mandatory Palestine that survived the 1967 War and that was reaffirmed by the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority in the aftermath of the Oslo Accord.
- 7.
A hosh is a semi-private area in a village neighborhood.
- 8.
Constructing a site narrative with a focus on community was a component of the USAID-SCHEP program, co-authored by Jehad Haron and Bert de Vries (SCHEP, n.d.).
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de Vries, B. (2022). Community Archaeology at Umm el-Jimal: Including the Recently Settled Umm el-Jimal Community in the Heritage of the Ancient Site. In: Badran, A., Abu-Khafajah, S., Elliott, S. (eds) Community Heritage in the Arab Region. One World Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07446-2_2
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