You can join our project and help uncover important new information about the
little known Early Bronze III period! We are accepting both volunteers
and students for the Field School program, in which you can earn college credits
through Arizona State University's Summer Sessions Program. Press the
"Join us in 2003!" link below, or "Join US!"
above.
For more information about the MARS Project, look at our field reports for the 2000 and 2001 seasons.
The Moab Archaeological Resource Survey (MARS) was
established in 1999 to gather information about archaeological sites in a
region of Jordan called the Madaba Plain, which is associated with the Old
Testament Kingdom of Moab.
Although I am especialy interested in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3600 to 2000
BCE), the MARS project is committed to locating and documenting sites of all
periods in our research area. Over the past three summers, and for the
next few years, we will be conducting archaeological surveys of the region to
discover unknown sites, and conducting detailed studies of the known sites in
the region that have not been thoroughly documented in the past.
In 1999, we began the project with a brief reconnaissance of the region, during which we looked at several sites from the Early Bronze Age (Khirbet Qarn al-Qubish, Ma`in, al-Murayghat, Khirbet Mukayat, and al-Murayghat). We decided to focus our research efforts first on Khirbet Qarn al-Qubish and al-Murayghat. We chose these sites because they were immediately accessible, and because they had very little soil deposition above the periods we wanted to study.
In 2000, we fielded our first full field season. We conducted detailed
mapping operations at Qarn and Murayghat, using a total station to map all the
surface features, including fortification walls at Qarn and megalithic
standing stone structures at Murayghat (such as the photograph shown
above). We also made a 20% random, stratified controled surface
collection from each site, and in the process, gathered more than 7,000 pieces
of pottery and several thousand lithics. We also mapped, photographed,
and measured 75 dolmens at Murayghat, such as the one shown here. You can see
more pictures, the site maps we created, and drawings of sherds, lithics, and
groundstone tools, in the 2000 Season Field Report.
In 2001 we went back to Murayghat and mapped an additional 25 dolmens. We then dug two excavation units at Qarn. One was placed across the gateway in the fortification system we mapped in 2000. In the photograph below, we are busy uncovering the original flagstone pavement in the gateway, which we dated to the EB III period (making it contemporary with the Pyramids of Egypt).
We collected about 500 sherds from the gateway and the north tower (Sid's hat is resting on one of the stones from the tower), plus lithics, charcoal and olive pits. We will be sending the charcoal and olive pits off for radiocarbon dating, because the EB III period is about 400 years long (from ca. 2600 to 2200 BCE), and we would like a more refined date for the fortification system.
The second excavation unit was dug in the midden (trash deposits) on the west side of the site, where our 2000 surface collection suggested we would be able to recover a large quantity of sherds and lithics. We were not disappointed. We collected over 4,000 sherds, several thousand lithics, plus a lot of animal bones, seeds, and charcoal. These materials will give us a lot of information about the agricultural economy at the site, and they showed us that the midden had begun to form in the Early Bronze I period (ca. 3600 - 3000 BCE), which means that the site was occupied from this date through the EB III period. Several of the sherds we found in the midden are new forms for the Madaba Plain, and may be related to ceramics that are imported from areas further north and west. So, even though Qarn was a small (ca. 2.7 hectares) site, it was still connected by trade to a larger world. An online version of our 2001 Season Field Report is available here.
