ABSTRACT
Classical archaeology in southern Jordan has focused on cities and towns, with much less attention paid to rural or marginal landscapes. This is not surprising, because the cities were centers of cultural life. Classical cities in particular, under Hellenistic and Roman influences, were opulent and vibrant, and most have retained their monumental aspect, which continues to attract our awe and attention. Nevertheless, it must be noted that cities housed merely a fraction of the population. Most people lived outside of cities, in smaller towns or villages, independently on small farms or in rural houses, or maybe even in tents. These are the people who supported the cities, and it is their story about which we know so little. Until the discovery of the Petra papyri, for example, scholars spoke of the decline of settlement activity in rural southern Jordan in the Byzantine period, but the scrolls have changed all that by illuminating the social and economic regional landscape. The absence of sites on archaeological maps, which supported this early view of settlement decline, is a product not of the non-existence of archaeological sites but of the absence of systematic surveys to document their presence. Only recently have efforts been made to explore the hinterlands of such great cities in southern Jordan as Petra, Roman Aila (‘Aqaba), or Al-Humayma. Since 1993, my own research in Wadi ‘Arabah (Fig. 1) has been to illuminate portions of the hinterlands of both Petra and Aila in classical antiquity.
