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REVIEW BY MATTHEW SYMONDS
This volume honours Professor David Kennedy, a pioneering scholar of ancient Arabia and Rome’s eastern frontier, by bringing together 21 scholarly contributions examining both the archaeology of the wider region, and the way that it is studied. As you would imagine, the Romans make their presence felt, but this volume is not simply an attempt to bring readers up-to-date with the latest thoughts and findings relating to their desert frontier. Instead, it scrutinises a much wider time frame, with the contents tackling topics that range from distant prehistory through to modern times. This seems apt, given that Kennedy’s own work involved documenting sites from the 7th millennium BC through to the 20th century. By showcasing the rich diversity of archaeology, the editors and contributors flesh out a complex region that lay on an empire’s edge, but also at the centre of many other cultural landscapes.
The wealth of material within the volume is organised into four parts: ‘Revisiting the Roman record’, ‘Reframing the record’, ‘Hinterland studies’, and ‘Sky, sand and basalt’. The first section critiques the trailblazing late-19th-century expeditions to the region by Rudolf Brünnow and Alfred von Domaszewski, who took a keen interest in the frontier sites and published their findings as Die Provincia Arabia. Other contributions take in places that range from the well-known, such as Dura-Europos in Syria, to those that have been less frequented by scholars, including the village of Artanada in southern Anatolia. Finds such as inscriptions and coins are employed to examine who the ‘Romans’ really were in such places, and how local cultural identities could exist side by side with the imperial political ones accompanying citizenship or military service.
Part 2 focuses on what can be gleaned from existing archival or published records from the region. Appropriately enough, given Kennedy’s appreciation of the power of aerial photography to illuminate the past, the contents consider the role of airborne reconnaissance, as well as the contributions of earlier cartographers and visitors. Among the characters we encounter is the Swiss scholar Burckhardt, whose covert trip to Petra in 1812 marks the first recorded contact in modern times between a European and the local inhabitants. There is also Antoine Poidebard, a priest and potential spy. He, too, succumbed to the pull exerted by the ruins of Rome’s former frontier, and took to the air in Syria in the 1920s and ’30s, capturing invaluable views of ancient monuments. When it comes to more recent aerial images, the wealth of photographs in the volume credited to initiatives that Kennedy was instrumental in establishing, such as the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East or APAAME, serves as a powerful demonstration of another of his legacies.
The section on ‘Hinterland studies’ leads us away from the major sites that can monopolise archaeological attention to consider the landscapes they lay within, the infrastructure they gave rise to, and the sites that existed in their orbit. The individual chapters transport us from the environs of Gerasa, in Jordan, to the growing role of the Church in Byzantine rural life, and the transition to the early Islamic world. If some earlier contributions invited us to consider what being Roman in the region meant, here the questions include just how much difference the end of the Late Antique world really made.
In the final, evocatively titled ‘Sky, sand and basalt’ section, aerial photography is once again to the fore, among a series of studies of desert environments in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Here, Roman frontier infrastructure like the Via Nova Traiana rubs shoulders with tombs; quarries; production sites; and ancient hunting traps known as kites, due to their appearance when viewed from above. Just as the volume successfully demonstrates the varied cultural landscapes in play, so too this section is a reminder of the different qualities of desert to be found in the region. One contribution also notes the importance of comparatively recent aerial photographs, given the extent of land clearance over the last seven years. Inevitably, the value of the photographs for capturing bygone eras is even more apparent with earlier examples, vindicating Kennedy’s view that they provide admirable foundations for further research.
Reframing the ‘Desert Frontier’: studies in the ancient Near East and northern Arabia in honour of David Kennedy
Rebecca Repper, Robert Bewley, and Mike Bishop (eds)
Adapa Monographs, £48
ISBN 978-1743329955
