The Tell Madaba Archaeological
Project and GIS Database

In the late 1990's I worked with Dr. Tim Harrison (of the University of Toronto) on the Tell Madaba Archaeological Project, in Jordan. Madaba is a city of about 50,000 people, located 30 km south of Amman on the Madaba Plain; the tell is in the heart of the city. Madaba was resettled in the 1870's, and has intact Late Ottoman buildings dating to this era, plus hundreds of more modern structures. Rebuilding, renovation, and new construction continue on the old site. As a result, our project has all the problems of a typical Near Eastern tell site, plus the added challenges of working in an urban setting.

A quick look at a map of "downtown" Madaba illustrates one of our primary problems: how do we identify the ancient tell site (and good places to excavate) when the modern city covers it entirely? Recent topographic maps of Madaba show all the modern and historic structures; as a result, they do not provide a good sense of the underlying landform. We have opted for an approach that uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods to remove the modern development from our computerized map database, revealing the surface of the tell as it exists today (shown below).

Archaeological survey work conducted by Dr. Harrison in 1993 recovered potsherds from time periods ranging from about 3500 BC up to the present day. By plotting the distribution of sherds from different time periods, we are able to target different parts of the tell (the pink squares contain Early Bronze pottery), and then begin looking for vacant lots, construction activity, and other exposures, where we then conduct archaeological soundings. The example shows our GIS of Tell Madaba, derived from a 1:1,250 scale topo map produced by the Royal Jordanian Geographic Society. We have about 40 different archaeologica themes in this GIS. Here you can see the distribution of Early Bronze Age pottery on the southern slopes of the lower tell. This distribution directed us to conduct excavations in Area A in 1996 (click the rectangle next to Area "A" on the topo map shown above to zoom to our Early Bronze Age structure).

The history and archaeology of Tell Madaba inform the development of urbanism in an agriculturally marginal zone (Madaba sits astride the 200 mm isohyet-rainfall is often sparse and always unpredictable). Our studies focus on various economic strategies and social structures with which ancient Madabites adapted to the marginal environmental conditions through time.

We accomplished four goals in 1996: 1) excavation of structures from the Early Bronze Age; 2) placement of a deep sounding through Iron II levels; 3) detailed mapping of Iron Age, Roman, Byzantine, and Late Ottoman structures on the West Acropolis (Area "B" on the town map above, and the photo), in preparation for digging there in 1998; and 4) integration of survey data into a regional GIS database. The summer of 1997 was a study season-ceramics from 1996 were analyzed; the regional and local GIS databases were expanded to hold about 1,500 sites on the 50 by 50 kilometer Madaba Plain. We will be excavating Byzantine, Roman, and Iron Age remains for two months next summer on the West Acropolis and investigating another area which revealed Early Bronze Age architecture on the last day of last season. We will continue in these areas for at least two additional seasons. We published a brief report of our 1996 season in the American Journal of Archaeology 101(3):508-510, and you can visit Tell Madaba on the World Wide Web.