Losing—and Salvaging?—the Rural Landscape of Graeco-Roman Philadelphia

Abstract

Between Biblical ‘Ammon’ and Early Umayyad ‘Amman’ lie a thousand years of Graeco-Roman Philadelphia. During this period the population of the classical city and its hinterland reached a peak not seen again until the 20th century. During the Middle Ages, however, the population shrank dramatically, the city was abandoned, an island of crumbling grandeur, surrounded by an equally depopulated landscape—the skeleton of a once thriving network of roads, villages, farms, monasteries, and field-systems. Even after re-settlement began at Amman in the 1870s, population in city and hinterland was thin and scattered, the abundant ruins often well-preserved. Development throughout the Belqa—the extensive fertile hinterland of Amman, was evident but relatively slow for some 70 years. After 1948, the impact of successive waves of refugees on top of a region-wide population explosion, began to transform the landscape and devastate the archaeological record. The process is accelerating and spreading. Even in the city, many substantial buildings captured on 19th century photographs have been lost to development; in the hinterland, the vital rural context of a great Classical city has been extensively overwhelmed. Nevertheless, much can yet be salvaged. Beginning with Seetzen in 1806, westerners began to explore ‘east of Jordan’. Many recorded their observations and some mapped, painted, drew, and increasingly photographed—including from the air. Collectively, the corpus of evidence is considerable, ranging from the observations of scores of early western visitors to the more recent archaeological surveys of the 1970s. Appropriately for present purposes, outstanding amongst such visitors and explicitly scientific and systematic were the PEF surveys of Warren in 1867 and Conder in 1881.