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| donkey riders - Lower Basin |
Today being 22 October 2011 means our time at Petra is getting short. Let me see… I know I have enough fingers to figure this out… counting today we have 3-days left before we head to Wadi Rum for a couple of days work there, then onto Amman for meeting with USAID & DOI’s Jordan Parks Project before flying back home (inshallah).
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| Columbarium |
So, what have we learned this time at Petra? Bringing travel coffee French press: good; renting car from a local guy: not-so-good. Actually there has been a lot, of course the learning curve was fuller the previous months here, but some revelations take longer before self-illumination or that BFO moment (“blinding flash of the obscure” or sometimes even the obvious). One aspect or work here that I’ve noted this time is it is hard to get your hands on research materials. With 12-16 institutions doing research in a “normal year” you’d think that more would pop-up on Internet searches. You can find research on big-ticket items, like sandstone weathering or Brown University’s excavations at The Great Temple (linked below), but try to find some good basic analysis of coprolite studies and you’re in a world of… hurt. Even the PAP staff has difficulty putting their hands on it. So, onward we plod.
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| Game board, trail to High Place |
Last night at dinner (Supervisory Ranger Sameer’s home) we again were afforded wonderful hospitality and opportunity to talk football (soccer to folks in US of A). It got me wondering about the games that the Nabataens would’ve been indulging in 2,000 years ago. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods there would’ve been the Olympic game events (and their harsh training methods [like whippings with a switch] that we’d find intolerable), but few would participate in those endeavors. There are several board-type game locations incised into horizontal surfaces around Petra. We saw one being used by vendor girls our 3rd day here in March. It involves the throwing of sticks and placing pebbles around stations that immediately reminded me of cribbage movements. Of course Mancala is an ancient past-time well pre-dating baseball and “The X-Games” (by some 3,000 years: see the link below).
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| another game board alonside trail to High Place of Sacrifice (photos by Bruce McKeeman) |
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