Cores and Peripheries Revisited: The Mining Landscapes of Wadi Faynan (Southern Jordan) 5000 BC–AD 700

One of Barry Cunliffe’s major areas of research interest has been societies in transition, especially in the context of core/periphery relationships between expanding states and societies on their margins. Much of this work has been on the relationships between Rome and the Iron Age societies of southern Britain on the northwestern margins of the empire, and the subsequent pathways of resistance, interaction, and transformation. In this chapter we focus on events and processes on the opposite margins of the Roman empire in the Levant, where the Nabataean state was formally incorporated into the Roman imperial system some sixty years after the Claudian invasion of Britain. We draw on the results of the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey (1996–2000), an interdisciplinary and diachronic investigation of evidence of environmental and climatic change, settlement pattern, and human activity in the Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan (figure 7.1). Situated about 40 kilometres from the Nabataean capital of Petra, the Wadi Faynan lies in the hot and hyper-arid Jordanian Desert, at a distinctive and spectacular mountain front that reaches 1500m above the desert floor. This landform marks the eastern margin of the desert lowlands of the great Jordanian rift valley, with the trough of the Wadi ‘Arabah to the south and west, and the highlands of the Mountains of Edom and the Jordanian tablelands to the east and north (Bienkowski and Galor 2006). The mean summer temperature on the Jordanian tablelands is in the order of 178c, compared with winter temperatures of about 12ºc (Bruins 2006; Rabb’a 1994). Winter temperatures on the desert floor in the Wadi Faynan are much the same as on the plateau, but in summer temperatures frequently reach 40ºc. Seasonality is strong, with most rain falling between December and March and virtually no precipitation occurring between June and September. Annual rainfall in the lower Wadi Faynan is around 63mm and even less in theWadi ‘Arabah (‘Aqaba receives 30mm for example), whereas the Jordanian Tablelands have an average precipitation exceeding 200mm per year.