and Amman/Philadelphia (Seetzen) and Petra (Burckhardt). Others followed, including the Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith, who, though their visits were brief, are considered to be the fathers of historical geography in the region. Unfortunately, their extensive work in Palestine (1837–1838, 1851–1852) was not duplicated east of the Jordan River.

One of the reasons why comparatively little exploration was undertaken through the 1800s was the political instability of the region. The population was a combination of settlers living in villages and Bedouin tribes, although under Ottoman Turkish rule, there was little protection or rule outside the more densely populated regions. The activities of the Bedouin, who were occasionally aggressive toward the villages and travelers, made exploration difficult and often dangerous. Foreigners’ visits to Transjordan were therefore sporadic and usually directed to specific known sites, since their primary focus was on the “Holy Land” (Cisjordan or Palestine) and its historical geography.

By the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman dominance of the region began to increase, and Ottoman governors were eventually appointed at Irbid to oversee the district of Ajlun (1851) and at Salt to oversee the central district of Belqa (1868). One of the main reasons for this growing political dominance of Transjordan was the need to control the Haj route for Islamic pilgrims to make their way to Mecca between Damascus and the Hejaz. And one of its outcomes was an increase in the exploration of the region by westerners.

The Development of Jordanian Archaeology during the British Mandate, 1918–1946

After World War I came to a close, the Sykes-Picot agreement established a British mandate in Palestine and Transjordan in 1918, and the area came under the control of the British Empire. Appropriately, the authorities established a department of antiquities in Palestine in 1920, led by the English archaeologist john garstang, and three years later a department of antiquities was set up in Amman to oversee the region of Transjordan.

With the advent of British rule, archaeologists found the territory more accessible and safer to explore, and during the mandate period they laid some of the major groundwork for our understanding of the archaeology and history of these regions. Research was not, however, restricted to British interests: several international schools, including some from france, Germany, and the United States, carried out significant projects in the southern Levant in these years.

A great deal of the work was concentrated in Palestine, but some was also conducted at various major sites of classical antiquity in Transjordan, including Amman, Jerash/Gerasa, and Petra. At Petra the earliest systematic excavations were undertaken in 1929 by George Horsfield, the first director of the Transjordan Department of Antiquities. Horsfield, a student of Garstang, worked on several of the major tombs of Petra, including the Palace Tomb, al-Kazneh, the Urn Tomb, and the Tomb of the Roman Soldier. In 1924 he also initiated the first work at Gerasa/Jerash, where he devoted considerable energy to clearing and reconstructing several of the site’s major monuments, including the south and north theaters, the Propylaeum of the Temple of Artemis, and the Nymphaeum. Four years later he was joined by an Anglo-American expedition from the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and Yale University, led by John Crowfoot; in 1930 a team from the american schools of oriental research (ASOR), under the direction of Clarence Fisher and later Nelson Glueck (in 1933 and 1934), also began to work with Horsfield. At Amman work on the citadel was carried out by the Italian Archaeological Mission beginning in 1927 and concluding in the 1930s, and from 1936 on other parts of the city were studied by the director of the Transjordan Department of Antiquities, G. Lankester Harding. Overall, these excavations revealed the exceptional state of preservation of many of the sites of classical antiquity. Efforts were begun to preserve them from the destruction that would ensue from development and expanding populations in the region.

Other notable projects in the British mandate period included the discovery of Teleilat el-Ghassul,