Øystein S. LaBianca
Andrews University
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The global problem to which our research in Jordan may offer some added insight and perspective is the question of why ethnic conflicts seem to persist, and appear, in fact, to be on the rise in many parts of the world today. Why do ethnic groups persist in maintaining their century-old sentiments of in-group solidarity? And why, of all places, is the relatively peaceful country of Jordan a place to look for answers to these global concerns? I would like to take up this last question first, as it can be answered quite quickly.
There are several reasons why Jordan is a good place to examine the question of how and why ethnic solidarities persist. The first is the fact that its resident Arab population has had to cope with nearly four millennia of foreign domination and ethnic encounters, from the Egyptians in the second millennium B.C. to the British and Americans in the present century. The second is that, compared to most other regions in the world, Jordan is quite unique in the extent to which its archaeological past, as it pertains to the history of the indigenous population, has been uncovered. And third, due to the country's proximity to Egypt, Israel, Syria and Mesopotamia, ancient textual accounts exist which refer to events which took place in Jordan in antiquity and thus add further to our ability to research ethnic encounters and cultural changes through the centuries and millennia.
What I will attempt to do in this paper, then, is to posit the existence of a complex of attitudes and practices by means of which the indigenous population of Jordan has managed to survive and persist despite the comings and goings of foreign governments and rulers. What I mean by "indigenous population" is the people of Arab origin - bedouin and fallahin - who have considered Transjordan as part of their homeland territory. I shall refer to these posited practices and attitudes as Jordan's "indigenous hardiness structures." What I mean by this term, and its implications for state formation in Jordan, will be explained further on.
The first is the semi-arid to arid climate, which has made scarcity of water a constant threat to the inhabitants of the region since Neolithic times. In Jordan it rains primarily between November and March, while the months of June through September are almost always completely without rain. Thus people have been forced either to rely on perennial springs and streams for their year-round water needs or to build and maintain cisterns, reservoirs and aqueducts for collecting and storing winter rains. An alternative option has been to adopt a transhumant lifestyle and migrate with herds of animals between highland and lowland pastures and depending on both springs and cisterns for water.
The second is the country's proximity to the Arabian and Negev deserts. For example, Jordan's entire eastern boundary is located along the frontier of the Arabian desert, while its southern frontier faces the Negev desert along its western boundary. This nearness to the desert has presented both opportunities and threats to the resident inhabitants of Jordan. On the one hand, when there has been sufficient winter rains, these deserts present attractive grazing opportunities for pasture animals. On the other hand, when rains have been insufficient, desert dwelling pastoral nomads are forced to spend longer periods with their herds in Jordan's well-water western highland, thus putting pressure on the region's settled population. The desert has also presented a convenient place to escape to for persons or whole tribes in time of conflict and as a means of resisting the heavy hand of foreign rulers.
The third geographical factor upon which much of Jordan's history pivots is the country's position astride one of the world's most important landbridges - the one which connects North Africa with Europe, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and much of the far east. Together with the coastal plain of western Palestine, the western highland plateau of Transjordan have for centuries and millennia provided armies, caravans and people groups with a corridor along which to pass in order to avoid having to traverse the desert. One of the reasons for the region's being under almost continuous control of foreign masters since the second millennium B.C. is precisely because of the vital importance of this communication and transportation corridor to the ambitions and designs of foreign rulers to the south, east and north.
Together, these three geographical factors provide a set of common denominators for understanding Jordan's history since the dawn of civilization down to the present. I shall turn next to explaining something about the specific multi-disciplinary research project by means of which this research on the history of Jordan's indigenous population is being carried out.
The event to which the Madaba Plains Project traces its origins is the launching of the Heshbon Expedition by Siegfried H. Horn of the Theological Seminary at Andrews University in 1968. As its name suggests, this expedition had as its original mission not to study the history of Jordan's indigenous inhabitants, but to excavate Tell Hesban to see what light, if any, it could shed on biblical stories about the conquest of the Heshbon region by the Israelites (Numbers 21; Joshua 13). That the present-day site of Tell Hesban had once been the Heshbon mentioned in the Bible in connection with these events is a claim which most biblical scholars had taken for granted when the project began.
Given the original mission of the Heshbon Expedition, what was produced by the excavations at Tell Hesban was not what had been hoped for. Instead of extensive remains from the biblical periods, the site produced a prolific quantity of material from the Greco-Roman (ca. 200 B.C. to A.D. 600) and especially the Ayyubid-Mamluk (ca. A.D. 1200 to 1450) periods. Fortunately, this situation did not lead to abandonment of further research at this site. Instead, it catalyzed re-thinking of the objectives of the entire project. Out of this re-thinking emerged the Madaba Plains Project which has identified as one of its explicit research foci to investigate the history of Jordan's resident Arab population.
More specifically, what led to this new focus was the dilemma of how to account for shifts over time in the extent to which Tell Hesban was settled and in the intensity with which its surrounding region had been occupied. The picture which our research had brought to light was that of a region undergoing repeated cycles of filling up and emptying out of traces of permanent settlements. Did people simply abandon the region during the emptying out phases of these cycles, or did they convert to nomadic ways which left few archaeological traces? Were the people who settled down during the filling up phases of these cycles the descendants of the region's pre-existing nomadic population or were they primarily immigrants from elsewhere? What was the role of successive central government apparatuses on the one hand, and of tribal polities on the other, in facilitating these changes? These are the sorts of questions which preoccupy much of the current research of the Madaba Plains Project.
One such assumption is that what most people in the past spent their time doing concerned, in one way or another, the daily tasks of maintaining their food procurement arrangements. A second is that, of all the activities the majority of men, women and children engaged in the past, none were more instrumental in producing the archaeological record than those related to the maintenance of these arrangements. A third is that the various activities involved in the quest for food are somehow systematically related.
This last assumption is, in fact, integral to the definition of the food system concept: A food system is a dynamic and complex unity consisting of all the purposive, patterned and inter-dependent symbolic and instrumental activities carried out by people in order to procure, process, distribute, store, prepare, consume, metabolize and dispose of food (LaBianca 1990).
Pivotal to understanding the dynamic aspects of food systems variability are the concepts of intensification and abatement. As we have explained elsewhere (LaBianca 1990; 1991), these concepts give an idea of the direction of variability in terms of the extent to which a given region is managed or exploited for purposes of providing its inhabitants with food, shelter and water. Generally, as a region's food system intensifies, its inhabitants tend to become increasingly land-tied due to increased investment in plough agriculture. Consequently their residential patterns tend to become more sedentary. Intensification, therefore, normally is accompanied by sedentarization.
Abatement is said to occur when a given region's inhabitants diminish their reliance on plough agriculture in favor of livestock production within a given territory or homeland. This generally involves adoption of more mobile residential patterns, or nomadization, whereby people, for the sake of their increased investment in pasture animals, turn to seasonal migration between watering places, ploughlands and pasturelands within a given territorial homeland.
The field procedures employed by the Madaba Plains Project in gathering and processing data relevant to its study of food systems and the phenomenon of sedentarization and nomadization include, as already indicated, excavations of several major tell sites, excavations of several smaller hinterland sites, archaeological surface surveys, investigations of pertinent historical texts and documents, and ethnographic inquiries among present-day inhabitants of the project area. To these may be added specialists' studies of various assemblages of artifacts such as pottery, stone objects, metal objects, human skeletal material, animal bones, carbonized seeds, and so on.
These various lines of inquiry contribute in different ways to reconstruction of changes over time in the extent to which people invested in ploughlands or pasture animals. For example, investment in ploughlands is reflected archaeologically in renewed settlement activity in formerly inhabited tell sites; restoration of cisterns, terraces and watch-towers in the hinterlands of such sites; occurrence in the animal bone samples of larger quantities bones of draft animals, and so on.
Typically such activities slack off during periods when investment in pastoral activity is on the rise. During such periods, people become more mobile, living in tents and caves in different locations according to seasons. Archaeologically, they leave comparatively fewer traces, although investigations of camping sites, burial sites, storage depots and herding stations provide valuable clues to the populations' activities during such periods. I would refer to our seasonal reports for much more extensive discussion of our methods and results (Geraty et al. 1987; 1989; Geraty and LaBianca 1985; LaBianca 1990; and Herr et al. 1991 for full details of our work).
When tourists visit Jordan, for example, what they are typically shown is the former: the remains of the Roman cities of Philadelphia (Amman), Geresa (Jerash) and Gedara (Um Qais), of the Byzantine Christian churches at Madaba and Mount Nebo, and of the crusader castles at Kerak and Shoubak. Even Petra tends to be presented to tourists in light of its Hellenistic upper layer, not in terms of its deeper Nabatean Arab history.
While in the past, this upper layer of Jordan's history was also the primary concern of Western and Jordanian scholars as well, this situation has now changed. As was clearly attested at the recent world congress of Jordan archaeologist and historians in Torino, Italy, the deeper layer concerned with the history of country's indigenous population from Neolithic to Islamic times is now clearly beginning to be exposed and studied.
As already indicated, both of these two layers of Jordan's past must be uncovered and analyzed in order to account for the cycles of sedentarization and nomadization which have occurred here over the past four millennia. On the one hand, it is necessary to investigate the political and economic agendas of the region's foreign occupiers in order to understand why the area was either invested in or neglected. On the other hand, it is equally important to examine the nature and extent of cooperation and/or resistance put forth by the local Arab population in response to each successive wave of foreign domination and control. As will become clearer further on, it is to a large extent the synergistic dynamics of these two sets of factors - along with the three geographical factors mentioned earlier - which account for the cycles of sedentarization and nomadization in Jordan's past.
From an archaeological standpoint it is also true that each wave of foreign domination is easier to detect than is the case with indigenously produced materials. Distinguishable, for example, in the pottery from Jordan is the influence of the Egyptians in the second millennium B.C.; the Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks in the first millennium B.C.; the Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads and Abbasids from the first century A.D. and the Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans and British from the second millennium A.D.
The agendas of these various foreign powers are also attested in other ways, as for example by the Roman's concern with building amphitheaters, reservoirs, roads and temples; or by the Byzantine's concern with building Christian churches; or by the Ummayad's penchant for constructing hunting lodges; or by the Crusader's obsession with building castles! The grand scale of some of these undertakings, and the remarkable extent to which many of them are still preserved in Jordan today makes it easy to understand why the upper layer of Jordan's history has received more attention than its deeper layer - that of its Arab inhabitants.
Perhaps the most significant result of these inquiries to date is what we have discovered about the extent to which continuity has prevailed when it comes to the material culture repertoire of Jordan's resident Arab population. As we have become more deeply acquainted with their history, we have begun to understand the reason for this continuity. It has to do with the priority which Jordan's resident Arab population has given to preserving future options over all other concerns. This concern led early on in their history to practices and attitudes which together constitute what we have begun to refer to as Jordan's "indigenous hardiness structures." I turn next to describing some of these structures.
A consequence of the co-occurrence of the processes of sedentarization and nomadization among Jordan's tribal peoples is that residential patterns representing different segments along the sedentism-nomadism continuum have co-existed in varying proportions in time and space. In other words, at any given point in time and space, nomadic, seminomadic, semisedentary, or sedentary groups have lived together in different numbers (see Gubser 1984: 24-25 for a succinct description of each of these terms). What has changed over time and space is the extent to which each has been represented proportionally.
To these seven institutions others could and no doubt will be added. The point here is that these are examples of institutions which have evolved among Jordan's indigenous peoples as a means to survive centuries and millennia without having to rely on centralized bureaucratic structures. They have, in other words, made the people "hardy" - able to survive all kinds of challenges to their autonomy and traditional way of life.
Indigenous Hardiness Structures and State Formation
One of the consequences of the operation of these age-old institutions in Jordan over the centuries and millennia has been that they have made it extremely difficult for state-level polities to take root and persist. Indeed, in the case of Jordan, the synergistic impact of these institutions has tended to be that of corrrosive agency - an agency which has gradually worn down and in the long run out-lasted the aspirations of foreign-imposed state-level polities. It is for this reason that Jordan's history has consisted of an upper layer of transient state-level polities and a deeper layer of grass-roots tribal organization based on persistent, ancient notions of claimed common lineal descent. The cycles of sedentarization and nomadization which have characterized the region's history are merely the material manifestation of successive attempts at state formation and centralization which ended in dissolution due, in part at least, to the hardiness of Jordan's resident Arab population.
It is interesting to note that at crucial times in their history, these indigenous inhabitants have succeeded in mounting their own supra-tribal state-level organizations. The two instances that come to mind is the formation of the Ammonite, (and also the Moabite and Edomite) state during the first half of the first millennium B.C. and the formation of the Hashemite state in the present century. Significantly, both of these indigenous state level systems functioned largely on the basis of tribal ideology. That is to say that both are examples of tribal kingdoms - polities in which tribal identity is the primary vehicle of political consciousness. Furthermore, in both cases, it has been the threat presented by the neighboring state of Israel that fueled the push toward formation of these indigenous states.
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© The author and Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Archived 30.9.95