Visited Today Ain Qasr and Ain Soda (Azraq Marsh)

Off at 8 am, on a jaunt down the Baghdad highway, into the Jordanian panhandle. We trundle through the city into and through the house furnishings souk: rolls of linoleum stacked against sleeping windows; parking lots lined with velvet-upholstered furniture. Out past Ain Gazal, where I am told Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age horse burials inhabited limestone caves above the spring. Through the industrial district of Zarka, choked with smog; lined with vehicle graveyards that escalate from diminutive taxis to rusting semi tractors, the latter incongruously piled on rooftops. The highway is lined with trucks, truckers, truck traffic: a free zone with tarp-covered trailer loads of every make and model; then fuel tankers in line after line.

Main destination today is the Azraq wetlands: once vast marshes; maybe continuously so since the Pleistocene, fed by aquifers seeping from beneath the Druze mountains. Vast tracts outside the marsh are demarcated into lines and squares by piles of basalt stone. Within these censurations sprawl Bedouin encampments, brown burlap tents fluttering in the wind, the livestock off grazing the thin pasturage somewhere out of view. Aquifer pumping has so lowered the water table that exposed peat is cracking and sloughing off. The Royal Water Authority diverts 10% of water back into the wetland to maintain a small fraction of its former extent. The fringe of palms with tamarisk are reminiscent of Borrego Springs or Ocotillo Wells, although, if left ungrazed, the surrounding countryside would revert to salt scrub, not cactus desert.

Reed brakes choke the open water—water buffalo keep patches of open water open. The springs are divided by an Umayyad wall designed to keep the salt from fresh water during medieval times. apparently one end had stone arches carved in animal reliefs, including elephant. A current rehabilitation project is adding a second pool system. The water buffalo are also a nuisance, damaging fencing and nets designed to protect fringe pools during rehabilitation. The reed is hard to identify—heavily cut over, it has dwarfed. Phragmites? It does not seem to be dense or tough enough to be Arundo. Staff poured us honey-sweetened tea in little glasses, then off we wandered through the brakes to an adobe observation hut overlooking a (literally) bucolic wallow. Happy, happy water buffalo.

Then north through Azraq itself—a two-dinar tire repair; shops catering to the highway trade bedecked with plush and plaster and plastic Tweety Pies (do people here even know of Sylvester and Tweety Pie?), because every trucker in the world must take presents home to his kids. One wonders: is it plush for girls, plastic for boys, and plaster for the garden? Cascades of nuts and seeds and spices and tins of olive oil; cheeses in oil; halvah and tahini. The road into town crosses onto the basalt fields sharply as crossing a watered pitch, past a series of once grand, now abandoned guest houses, and then suddenly looms the black blocks of Azraq castle: Lawrence's wartime HQ with its two-ton solid granite door.

Onward to Amman, the southern road, through horizon-wide pebble plains, trackless and capped with desert varnish, grazed clean of any puff of chaff. Along a long-dry wadi lies Qasr Amra—a little Umayyad bubble with its touristic roadway sign, as for a stagecoach inn along the Butterfield stage. Concrete cones, a meter high, run parallel awhile: these are markers along the old Mandate track to Baghdad. We careen behind, through, alongside truck convoys ferrying limestone nodules the size of squashed Volkswagens to facing-tile plants around the city. Qasr Kharanah, foursquare, turreted, heads a second wadi, overviewing an Epipaleolithic tell.

Dust devils boil past flocks of desolate sheep, fed from trucked-out grain; watered by tankers, but nonetheless allowed to graze to scorched earth any seed that dares germinate under the moisture-sapping wind. We pass a truck overtopped with green—cattail? reed? Headed toward the sheep camps.

The Land before Baghdad

Amman.

The air for the flight out yesterday was stunningly clear, lending to pensive consideration of landscape, agriculture, and the land before Baghdad. I'll update this post later with a more descriptive account.

Arrived uneventfully to bustling Amman, to glorious weather. Cool, breezy, and clear. Second Session of our Summer Workshops is well underway, with participants ever more actively engaged. Roger Matthews has joined the teaching faculty for these last few weeks. (See our website for the full course list).

It was amazingly soothing to hear traffic late in the evenings: a sudden return to normal street life.

Intellectual Reconstruction

It's hard to know what to do to help reconstruct "ordinary" life after a war. No situation; no life; is ordinary under such circumstances. Some render heroic assistance: food, medicine, water, shelter, evacuation…the kind of help that provides the very basis for ordinary life to become possible once again. But not all of us are trained or equipped to do that.

So some of us try to render a different kind of help: an optimistic sort of help that presumes that ordinary life can and will return, envisions that return, and prepares for it while building toward it. We peer into postholes. We focus on the slice of life that's ordinary for us, because that's what we know about. That's what, over the long term, we can envision, because it's what we do.

But we are archaeologists. By most standards, we are not ordinary ourselves. We are accustomed to thinking about ordinary life as lived over the past several thousand years, not over the last several hundred hours. Yet, manifestly, a preoccupation with some distant past, populated by people now long dead, is utterly inappropriate in the midst of urgent need among the living. How do we connect the two? How do we connect a preoccupation with an ordinary past, to the hope of an ordinary future?

Well, in small ways, with ordinary people living in the present. We are actively engaged in re-building archaeology programs at universities in Iraq. We are trying to restore looted libraries, refit looted classrooms, and re-connect students and faculties cut off from one another and the world outside. We are not engaged in combat. We are not embedded in "hot" zones. We are just going about a very odd little bit of ordinary life, under extraordinary circumstances.

Along the way, I'll try to describe what ordinary things we see, and reflect a bit on pasts, presents, and futures.