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Show nabataean capital ammnncsaim (team .mmaips IbimoSedi ft Ddlaimfiaim the rose-re- d PETRA, city, famed for the beauty of its rock and important for the ancient civilizations that flourished there, is being mapped by the University of Utah. tion center for the luxuries of the East en route to Greece and Rome. At the apex of their success, the Nabataeans had some 1,000 depots, shipping centers and various outposts under their control. There were Naba- - PETRA WAS the capital city of the Nabataeans, who occupied it from the 4th century B.C. until they were dislodged by Roman legions in the time of the Emperor Still later Baldwin I, the Crusader king, built a huge fortress just outside the valley to levy tribute from passing caravans, swelling the revenues of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Nabataeans began as Bedouin pirates, herdsmen and caravaneers, but they developed into commercial of considera- ble importance in Syria and Palestine, utltimately controlling the caravan routes from southern Arabia frankincense and myrrh from India and China and and from Mesopotamia Petra became a Then darkness falls on Petra. From the 12th century to he 19th, Petra was lost to the western world. Dr. M. Ann Dennett was associate director of the expedition. Ex-Uta- distribu-- i tal funerary rock carvings AND LATER, after the Roman conquest, Petra became famous as an early Christian episcopal seat, the home of the Byzantine Monks of St. Aaron. in 106 A.D. Persia. AMONG THEIR physical legacies are the monumen- Before they arrived the site was the location of Biblical Sela, from whose peak King Amaziah is said to have thrown 10,000 Edomites during the Israeli conquest of Edom. The mapping was done electronically, because the city is still largely beneath the surface. entrepreneurs taean commercial agents on the Persian Gulf, in Egypt and in the West. But the history of the site neither begins nor ends with the commerce and carving of the Nabataeans. including anthropologists from other universities and a team of 14 students. Trajan My on the walls of the valley itself, plus hundreds of other religious carvings and installations. It is this rock carving ability that made Petra a showplace of the ancient world. The work on the site 50 miles north of the Gulf of Aqaba in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was largely completed this summer by a team led by Dr. Philip C. Hammond, associate professor of anthropology at the university, and W It was on Aug. 22, 1812, that John Burckhardt redis- covered the city. Since then Dr. Philip C. Hammond on the red rock walls overlook buried city of Petra it has become a major tourover 3,000 ist attraction and has visitors a year been designated a national park, to be designed from a master plan which will, in turn, be the joint work of the Jordanian government and a planning team from two American agencies, the Parks Commission and the Agency for International Development. DR. HAMMONDS American Expedition to Petra employed a device called the to conduct what was described as the largest-scal- e electronically instrumented site survey ever to have been conducted at an ancient archaeological site in southwest Asia. The device measures differences in the earths magnetic force field. The team also used soil resistivity instruments. Both helped locate and map the archaeological remains of the ancient civilization that now are buried. The party also performed conventional surface mapping operations of visible remains, tying them to the proton-magnetomet- sub-surfa- e THE finds. EXPEDITION the site into 71 grids. 30 meters square a total of 63,900 square meters. That represents 80 percent of the surveyable area of the ancient city. The raw data taken in the field will be analyzed by the universitys computer, using previously developed programs. In addition, the site has been tied to worldwide map reference points, us- each Dr. Hammond directed the first American expediHis tion to Petra in 1961-6excavations at Hebron, burial place of the Hebrew Patriarchs, was interrupted y War. in 1967 by the Six-Da- ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS of the project were Dr. M.A. Bennett, Eastern New Mexico University, and Dr. William Poe, California State College at Sonoma. . Transverse Mercator .Dr. Bennett, who received her doctorate in 1972 from The team estimated the Utah, is a Highland High accuracy of the survey at graduate. within .03 pertent. Students from the UniverDR. HAMMOND, an insity of Utah involved in the included ternational authority on the Petra project Nabataean culture and a Brook Bowman, Pamela man of wide experience in Gibson, Ronald Read, Nelson Woodbury, Richard the Middle East, has been at the University of Utah Sorensen, Suzan and Leon for four years. He helped Brydson, the Rev. Mr. John Fouad Momena, establish the university Burk, Middle East Program in Piruz Samiy, and Kenneth Russell. Anthropology and the Research LabNext for the American e oratory in the Anthropology Expedition are large-scalDepartment, devoted to the excavations at the site bescientific analysis of ancient ginning in the summer of artifacts and other remains. 1974. These, like the earlier The ARL, in conjunction project, will be a joint venture with the Jordanian Dewith the Archaeomelric Research Group founded on partment of Antiquities, whose director general, campus last year, gives the university an analytical Yaquob Oweis, discussed apparatus unmatched In the the plans with the Ameri-- t cans before their departure. 7. , ; . i Southwest. ing the International grid-system- . i |