Abstract
Water has always played a central role in the human occupation of the high desert in which the Petra World Heritage Site is located. Precipitation in the Petra region is meager today, about 200 mm per year, and there is no indication that it was greater during the Nabataean era. The rocky, steep terrain, however, channels both precipitation and water from a number of springs to the wide canyon in which the ancient city was constructed. This can be seen in Fig. 5.1. In this image, the core area of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra is indicated by a yellow circle. Flow accumulation has been calculated in cubic meters of water, and volumes of water are color coded from yellow (least) to dark red (greatest).
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Comer, D.C. (2012). Hydrology, Human Occupation, and Preservation on the Landscape of Petra. In: Tourism and Archaeological Heritage Management at Petra. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(), vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1481-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1481-0_5
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