Elena Corbett's ambitious volume lays out the important contributions of archaeological narratives to turath (heritage) in the territory of modern Jordan. Whereas formative publications in recent years have chronicled the development and impact of archaeology and heritage laws in other parts of the former Ottoman Empire, including Greece, Turkey, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria,Footnote 1 Jordan has proved more elusive. This situation owes, no doubt, to a series of fundamental political changes in the region over the last century and a half.
As argued by Corbett, antiquities in Jordan have been subject to “an ongoing and adaptive competition between foreign and indigenous powers with roots in the context of late nineteenth-century imperialism” (3). She opens her analysis of evolving archaeological discourse in the region with antiquities laws and collecting practices in Bilad-al-Sham or Greater Syria during the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. She then charts the shifting ideologies of the institutions and scholars that conducted archaeological research, promoted patrimonial conservation, and attracted tourism to the territory from the period of the Great War to the British Mandate, establishment of Hashemite rule in 1921, the 1948 expansion of Jordan into the West Bank, and Jordan's recalibration following its loss of the West Bank in 1967.
Corbett's argument rests upon the premise that consecutive authorities in the territory, which was not a discrete political, cultural, or administrative unit before the twentieth century, found in antiquities an important rationale for the existence of the artificially created nation-state. They believed that the successful imprinting of Jordanian identity and loyalty to the Ottoman sultans, authorities of the British Mandate, and finally the Hashemite dynasty, required that the general population receive a unified narrative of the region's history. Each referred at least in passing to the region's ancient monuments. Noting how the contours and population of the Jordanian state and the geopolitics of the region changed over time, Corbett reveals the flexible strategies that governed heritage policy. Although some of its features were unique to Jordan's history, archaeological practice in colonial and postcolonial Jordan faced challenges similar to those experienced in other regions of the former Ottoman Empire.
Corbett's reconstruction of the evolving landscape of archaeological consciousness is less convincing when she characterizes this part of Bilad-al-Sham (and later Transjordan and Jordan) as a negative space for antiquities. She bases this claim on the fact that authorities defined this region through juxtaposition with more richly developed archaeological narratives of the Holy Land (and later the state of Israel) and pilgrimage traditions in the Hijaz. Here, Corbett's analysis would have benefitted from greater attention to the perceptions of indigenous inhabitants of the region—gleaned from ethnographic, historical, or religious sources—and an exploration of the tensions between their understandings of ancient monuments and those of archaeologists. Attention to Ottoman-era (or even late medieval) Arab historians might have likewise offered testament to the existence of a richer vision of the landscape, one that predated and inflected that of the modern nation.
Corbett's monograph, while valuable for the light it sheds on a poorly understood topic, is not an easy read. Incomplete editing of the 2009 dissertation from which it is derived has left its traces in the form of mechanical introductions with their contents unnecessarily repeated in subsequent chapters. Some opaque jargon obscures the important points being made. The book's introduction contains disappointingly few references, so it is difficult to identify the author's methodological and historiographical influences. These shortcomings, however, should not detract from the new perspectives that Corbett's analysis contributes to our understanding of a timely and fascinating topic.
