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ome stretches of the roman cobbled street which like for example the colonnaded street in urban jerash is not something for high heels or weak ankles or indeed horse carriages but that doesn t stop anybody from trying and that s the easy part of the site while the main route through the ancient city is fairly well paved by thousands of feet every day some of the most rewarding places you can see in petra are found at the top of hundreds of stairs cut into the soft sandstone 950 stairs to the monastery madame take a donkey up just 20 minutes walk 1 hour it s not a hard walk up to the monastery just a little steep if you re out of shape and a little pressured by the faster climbers in the group and the masses of donkeys carrying fat people to the top and it s definitely worth it if not for the archaeology then certainly for the amazing views across the wadi arabah but it s not the staircase to the upper level of the museum every tour leader will tell you that every guidebook will warn you about that and yet there s people in footwear that i wouldn t recommend for visiting tamed archaeological sites anywhere example wearing riding boots and see through riding pants when climbing not donkey riding up to the monastery why nobody looks twice if you re appearing a little rough and disheveled from your long hikes around petra there s no 5 star restaurants at the top of the stairs that you need to be dressed like a mannequin for a cup of tea is 1 jd for everybody if you fall on your ass in white trousers which you most likely will in those boots you ll look like an idiot for the rest of the day and you re probably not going to get the red sand out for a few washes yet i wonder if it is a real concern to some people to distinguish themselves from the local appearances example handbag and a suede suit why to be honest i never understand the handbag thing you automatically lose one hand because you keep having to hold on to the bag so it won t slip off your shoulder which means your balance is off even on level ground and if you fall you ll land flat on your face because one hand alone won t hold you up and a suede suit it s not a catwalk it wasn t even cold although there were a lot of people running around in thick ski jackets and with fleece hats and gloves while the sun was shining brightly down on them i don t understand that either just because the calendar says it s winter doesn t mean it s freezing cold example other amusing clothing decisions include tight jeans that are bound to burst when you need to stretch a little to climb over a boulder and look there s the boots again although it doesn t look like these particular people on their out ever left the main route the always worrying display of bare legs and those little shoes that will fill up with sand in no time and are rather unlikely to support your ankles across terrain any rougher than the hotel carpet i simply don t get it how hard is it to pack a decent pair of walking shoes if you re going on a tour across a massive archaeological site or to pack some less revealing clothes that you can actually be active in maybe a tour to jordan should include a friday morning trip to the abdali market to purchase some cheap second hand clothes for the journey it would certainly be more of a cultural experience than overnighting at the movenpick hotel and be bussed around everywhere without any contact to the local population posted in archaeology jordan people tags archaeology clothes jordan petra 10 000 bc december 25 2007 leave a comment has anybody seen the trailer s for this new roland emmerich movie it seems to have everything pleistocene mammals just minutes from extinction c0nsidering the setting of the movie in an apparently warm and fairly arid place by 10 000 bc mammoths and sabre tooth tigers should probably be already gone heroic men in love women with plucked eye brows sailing boats pyramids and metal weaponry the only thing that s missing at least from the previews is any archaeological foundation of any of this of course a film by the same guy who did the day after tomorrow which i just watched last night will hardly proclaim to be accurate in as much as such a term can be used for a story like this yet i still have a hard time putting it into the fantasy category i can see myself watching it with a notebook on my lap writing down every single thing that i know is wrong pyramids metallurgy sails and be utterly disappointed not to say i won t be entertained but there is one of the few movies that tackle a time in human prehistory that can tell a great story based on a good body of evidence and it s going to turn into another one million years bc and that upsets me because it s unnecessary posted in archaeology movies tags movie four stone hearth 30 december 20 2007 leave a comment the 30th anniversary edition of the four stone hearth blog carnival is over at the greenbelt go check it out of course most of you will have come here through the post i submitted i m glad to be a part of this and shall endeavour to write something meaningful for the next one too posted in carnival tags blog carnival neolithic and chalcolithic earthquakes in jordan december 13 2007 1 comment my recent dabbling in the world of prehistoric earthquakes far they may be from my main research interests has at last made it possible for me to have a meaningful conversation with a number of prominent archaeologists without me feeling inferior and unable to contribute i went to a lecture last night introducing in very broad terms the ritual aspect of the southern levantine chalcolithic a subject about which i have been embarrassingly ignorant it was expertly presented by dr yorke rowan of notre dame university who is currently a fellow at the american centre for oriental research here in amman although most of the evidence in the talk came from israeli or palestinian sites a small number of dots were on the jordanian site of the map the only site of chalcolithic date c 4 500 3 600 bc that i have any kind of familiarity with and by familiarity i mean that i have heard of it and seen a picture i might have driven past once too is teleilat ghassul halfway up the plateau at the very northern edge of the dead sea but little has been written about it and less has been read by me i had a brief browse through lovell 2001 though prior to the last post mainly because there appears to have been a significant enough earthquake in the immediate vicinity of ghassul at around about 4 000 bc to justify the question to the chalcolithic specialist as to whether there was any evidence in the stratigraphy of chalcolithic sites and i didn t want to sound like a complete tool as it turns out what little mention there is of any cracks in the architecture of the site might be found only in basil hennessy s records i could certainly not see any reference in lovell s work apparently there are good signs for at least two major earthquakes at tall hujayrat al ghuzlan a late chalcolithic and bronze age site just outside aqaba on the red sea nobody gives any rough dates for these although it appears that they might be quite late and probably right in the vicinity to have caused such recognisable destruction publications are hard to find the excavations are a joint german jordanian venture and nobody writes anything much more interestingly it turns out is a reference in the migowski et al 2004 paper to a possible unlocated quake at round about 7 000 bc a time when both gary rollefson and hans georg gebel might have evidence for some destruction at ppnb ain ghazal and basta respectively gary mentioned how one of the sub terranean altar features basically a round stone lined pit with a plaster ceiling a hole in the centre and a couple of water channels feeding it had been reconstructed at some point in a very rushed and shoddy manner after it was apparently damaged by forces stronger than a person the interpretation of the feature as an altar is ambiguous likewise the claim for temples or other such structures on a site like ain ghazal a phd student from la trobe who is studying natufian art has jokingly theorised that such installations might be sewers or other sorts of plumbing it s almost a convincing argument more so at times than a ritual interpretation i hope i ll be updated about this it would be shame to have initiated such a discussion and than have it taken away from me lovell j l 2001 the late neolithic and chalcolithic periods in the southern levant new data from the site of teleilat ghassul jordan oxford england archaeopress migowski c a agnon r bookman j f w negendank m stein 2004 recurrence pattern of holocene earthquakes along the dead sea transform revealed by varve counting and radiocarbon dating of lacustrine sediments earth and planetary science letters 222 301 14 posted in archaeology earthquakes jordan tags archaeology earthquakes jordan dead sea earthquakes history archaeology and a doomsday prediction december 10 2007 1 comment a series of small earthquakes in the immediate dead sea area in the last two weeks of november ranging between 3 0 and allegedly 5 1 on november 20th 2007 which has more widely been reported as reaching a modest 4 5 on the richter scale has set off renewed worry about a major shake up in the near future and just how prepared we are for it the opinion camps can be divided quite smoothly into those predicting a significant earthquake within the next two decades or so based hugely on bible citations and an arbitrary pattern extracted from historical earthquakes along the israeli side of the dead sea transform and those insisting or maybe reassuring the public that such minor tremors are far from indicators of a major quake and that they are mainly functioning as regulatory measures to equalise the tension in this fault rich area i know embarrassingly little about the mechanisms behind earthquakes at least beyond basic plate tectonics taught in geography classes in secondary school however just a little research shows that it takes more than to select a small number of major quakes within the national boundaries of israel to suggest a pattern and make doomsday predictions the list of earthquakes along the jordan valley is long after all the dead sea rift isn t a small one varve counting and radiocarbon dating of lacustrine sediments at the shore of the dead sea has found geological confirmation of most major historical and recent quakes above 6 0 on the richter scale and has found proxy data for quakes going as far back as the early 7th millennium bc migowski et al 2004 according to this there has been a major tremor along the the dead sea transform dst from the red sea in the south to catching up with the east anatolian fault line in south eastern turkey on average every one hundred years this pattern is clearest for the last 2000 years or so for when there is ample historical evidence for these natural disasters these have been spaced variably very close to the dead sea but also up to about 400km along the rift making for an even distribution of quakes across the levant and thereby limiting the amount of damage done to the area the intensity of the destructive capability equally depends on the depth of origin of the quake and this is visible in the thickness of the disturbed sequences of sediment in the cores taken for analysis migowski et al 2004 308 this research has allowed the extraction of a couple of interesting patterns of earthquake occurrences which can be compared to the historical basis of the doomsday predictions of israeli geologists chronological pattern overall the recurrence data from the dead sea suggest that the rate of seismic activity along the dst changed several times during the last 10 000 years migowski et al 2004 311 this is a very rough chronological outline early holocene c 8 000 5 500 bc seismically quiet although a bias in the accuracy of the core s bottom levels might influence this picture this was the time of the development and perfection of agriculture and animal domestication during the aceramic and ceramic neolithic of the levant the suggestion has been made that the aggregation of people in so called mega sites in the later ppnb in jordan middle to late 7th millennium bc was the result of an increased level of destruction in the valley forcing migration up onto higher grounds rollefson pers comm but no evidence for such settlements in the jordan valley have been found to confirm the earthquake hypothesis later prehistory c 5 000 1 bc moderately active with a cluster of seismic activity between 1 000 and 2 100 bc the chalcolithic period c 4 500 3 600 bc during which pastoralism flourished and a number of current staples became domesticated e g olive ended with a notable collapse of the settlement system then predominant and transformed into the proto urban early bronze age levy 1995 an earthquake of some magnitude is mentioned around 4 000 bc in the upper jordan valley although it s relation to the transition collapse needs to be further examined the more active part of this later prehistoric period falls into the end of the early bronze age c 2 000 1 600 bc which is characterised by large scale destruction and abandonment of the fortified towns of the time in favour of nomadic small scale settlement the ruins at pella modern tabaqat fahl in the northern jordan valley bear evidence of such destruction in the massive walls of the bronze age structures while the map produced by midowski et al 2004 see below does not identify any significant quakes in the immediate vicinity of the site the geological sequence indicates a serious of major shake ups that might have enveloped the entire area a major earthquake is recorded in israel in 31 bc being the oldest historically documented disaster in the region historical period 0 1 000 ad low frequency of seismic activity nevertheless quakes that did strike had devastating results in the entire levant as the earthquake of 749 ad can attest that even quakes of 7 0 or higher on the richter scale have left little evidence in the historical and archaeological records might be related to their epicentres being located at quite some distance from the dst or underneath the mediterranean sea and or originating so deep underground that not much of the tremor reached the surface the geological sequence indicates mainly microscopically thin layers of disruption during that time period modern period since 1 000 ad active especially the last 500 years have been recorded as particularly active with major earthquakes striking at a high frequency all across the region notably in 1837 just north of the sea of galilee and 1927 at the northwestern end of the dead sea geographical pattern with a few exceptions the epicenters of the matched earthquakes are situated very close to the dead sea within 150 km or up to 500 km north of it along the dst migowski et al 2004 312 again this is a very rough summary consult the cited...