Walking Through Jordan - Essays in Honor of Burton MacDonald - Michael Neeley

Walking Through Jordan - Essays in Honor of Burton MacDonald - Michael Neeley

Going Over Old Ground: Archaeological Survey in Jordan Then and Now

Walking Through Jordan - Essays in Honor of Burton MacDonald - Michael Neeley

Edward Banning [+-]
University of Toronto
Edward Banning is a professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at University of Toronto, where he also obtained his PhD in Near Eastern Studies in 1985. In addition to serving on the Wadi Tumilat Project, Wadi al-Hasa Survey, and excavations at the Neolithic site of ‘Ain Ghazal, he has directed the Wadi Ziqlab Project and the Wadi Quseiba Project, which have focused mainly on the late prehistory of northern Jordan through archaeological surveys and targeted excavations. He has also been deeply involved in research on the theory and method of archaeological survey, including his book, Archaeological Survey (Banning 2002).

Description

When Burton Macdonald began the Wadi al-Hasa Survey in 1979, the methods and theory of archaeological survey were undergoing substantial revision in light of innovations first explored in North America, but beginning to gain ground in Mediterranean regions. The Wadi al-Hasa Survey was one of the first in Jordan to experiment with explicit sampling frames and more intensive fieldwalking at a time when most surveys there were still “windshield surveys” conducted mainly from vehicles. Soon most Jordanian surveys were employing similar sampling and fieldwalking methods so that they became the new standard as a stream of projects documented thousands of previously unrecorded sites. However, consumers of data from these surveys should be using them critically, with attention to variations in intensity, coverage, and visibility. Recent advances in survey theory and some recent field-tests of these theories demonstrate that post-fieldwork evaluation is necessary if we are to draw convincing conclusions about settlement patterns and especially about alleged absences of archaeological resources.

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Citation

Banning, Edward . Going Over Old Ground: Archaeological Survey in Jordan Then and Now. Walking Through Jordan - Essays in Honor of Burton MacDonald. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 265-279 Nov 2017. ISBN 9781781792834. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=28930. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.28930. Nov 2017

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