ThearchaeologyofLawrenceofArabiaswarareportontheGreatArabRevoltProjectsfirstfieldseasoninNovember2006.docVIP

The archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s war: a report on the Great Arab Revolt Project’s first field season in November 2006 by Neil Faulkner, Nick Saunders, and David Thorpe The archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia’s war? We had very little idea what this would mean. A modern scientific archaeology of the First World War is a recent development, and most of what has been done so far has occurred in North-Eastern France and Belgian Flanders. Here, on the former Western Front, archaeology is as grim as it gets. The war was fought underground, in trenches, dugouts and tunnels. The same ground was churned again and again by shelling. The earth is saturated with munitions. There are bits of body everywhere in the mud. But what would the First World War look like in Southern Jordan? No-one had ever tried to find out. Archaeologically it was terra incognita. To the west, in what was then Palestine and is now Israel, the British and the German-led Ottoman Turks had fought a fairly conventional war. As on the Western Front, there were lines of trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, and head-to-head battles in which machine guns slaughtered attacking infantry. There were even tanks and fighter-aircraft. But east of the Jordan valley, in the country that is today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a very different kind of war was fought. It has been called many things: irregular warfare, guerrilla warfare, people’s war, protracted war, resistance war, the war of the flea – all implying a form of war in which one side may be stronger in men, firepower and logistics, but the other resists with improvised weapons, popular support, and endless patience, fighting a makeshift war of hit-and-run and slow, deliberate, debilitating attrition. What would be the archaeological imprint of such a conflict? We were about to find out. We worked on two sites. One of these lies on the south-eastern edge of Ma’an, the largest town in Southern Jordan, where an important Hijaz Railway statio