The Jabal Hamrat Fidan Project: Excavations at the Wadi Fidan 40 Cemetery, Jordan (1997)

The desert and the sown: Nomad–farmer interactions in the Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan

“…2), towards the end of the second millennium BC (Ben-Yosef et al, 2010). Also, graves of aceramic people equipped with wooden bowls have been found in an Iron Age cemetery in Wadi Fidan (Levy et al, 1999), so the absence of pottery in the Wadi Faynan may not necessarily be evidence for the absence of people. On balance the evidence suggests that the Wadi Faynan was the base for predominantly pastoral use through much of the second millennium BC, though people continued to extract and process copper ores.…”

The Iron Age Egyptian Amulet Assemblage

“…Registration Details and Context: Wadi Fidan ‫ﺍﻟﻔﻴﺪﺍﻥ‬ ‫ﻭﺍﺩﻱ‬ 40 (WFD 40), Season 1997, Area A, Grave 92, Locus 531, Basket 2152. Grave 92 was one of the first systematically excavated tombs in the Wadi Fidan 40 cemetery (Levy et al 1999). Like most of the graves, Not for Publication 746 Stefan Münger and Thomas E. Levy this one was disturbed in antiquity, as evidenced by the removal of one of the capstones covering the rectangular cist.…”

Iron Age Nomads and their relation to copper smelting in Faynan (Jordan): Trace metal and Pb and Sr isotopic measurements from the Wadi Fidan 40 cemetery

“…Excavations were carried out in 1997, 2003, 2004, and 2009, and revealed a mortuary site utilized by pastoral nomads during the Iron Age II, ca. 10th and 9th centuries BCE (Beherec, 2011;Beherec et al, 2014;Levy et al, 2004a;Levy et al, 1999Levy et al, , 2005. Building on the results of this previous research, this study examines the relationship between nomadic populations and smelting sites evidenced by isotopic and chemical analyses.…”

“…These characteristics make the Wadi Fidan 40 cemetery different from other Iron Age cemeteries in the Mediterranean zones of the southern Levant which are found close to settlement sites (Bloch-Smith, 1992;Faust, 2004). Unlike a number of cemeteries in the Wadi Arabah (see for example, the Early Bronze cemetery at Bab edh-Dhrah, Ortner and Frohlich, 2008), Wadi Fidan 40 is notable for the lack of ceramic grave goods and the presence of wooden bowls (Levy, 2009;Levy et al, 1999Levy et al, , 2005. In addition, tumuli in the desert zones of the southern Levant are primarily linked to nomadic communities and these are part of the Iron Age burial patterns in the Wadi Fidan area (Beherec et al, 2014;Bloch-Smith, 2003).…”

“…In addition, tumuli in the desert zones of the southern Levant are primarily linked to nomadic communities and these are part of the Iron Age burial patterns in the Wadi Fidan area (Beherec et al, 2014;Bloch-Smith, 2003). And finally, based on contemporary ancient Egyptian records that span the 15th to 10th century BCE, there were nomadic people who lived in Edom at this time that the Egyptians referred to as Shasu nomads, who were West-Semitic speaking nomads from the southern Levant during the Late Bronze Age and Early Bronze Age (Levy et al, 2004a;Levy et al, 1999). Consequently, ELRAP researchers link the buried population in the Wadi Fidan 40 cemetery with the Shasu nomads (Beherec et al, 2014;Levy et al, 2005).…”