Indigenous Hardiness Structures and State Formation in Jordan

Towards a history of Jordan's resident Arab population

Øystein S. LaBianca
Andrews University

Paper presented at The third Nordic conference on Middle Eastern Studies:
Ethnic encounter and culture change
Joensuu, Finland, 19-22 June 1995.


NB *This is the unedited paper as given at the Joensuu conference. An updated and edited version has been published in Sabour and Vikør, Ethnic encounter and culture change, Bergen/London 1997, 143-57. Please quote or refer only to the published article.*

Abstract

In this paper I take up the question of why ethnic solidarities continue to persist in many parts of the world today, with the consequence that ethnic conflicts also continue to occur. On the basis of insights gained from archaeological research in Jordan, I posit the evolution in Jordan - and in many societies around the world - of "indigenous hardiness structures" which, due to their combined effect, are inherently corrosive and dissolving of state-level polities? Such structures have attained great strength and resilience in countries like Jordan because of almost four millennia of foreign domination and exploitation of the indigenous population. Examples of such structures mentioned include the following practices and institutions: tribalism, multi-resource economic pursuits; maintenance of fluid homeland territories, residential flexibility; low-care water sourcing; hospitality and honor.

Introduction

In harmony with the theme of this conference, my presentation today deals with ethnic encounter and culture change in the country of Jordan. Being an archaeologist, I bring, as you might expect, a long-term perspective to this theme- - one which in this case spans four millennia. In particular, my aim today will be to highlight some of what we have learned as archaeologists of the history of Jordan's indigenous population. This history, as we shall see, is a different one from the one most tourists encounter when they visit the country. It is a history of the country's Arab inhabitants, as opposed to the history of its foreign occupiers.

The global problem to which our research in Jordan may offer some added insight and perspective is the question of why ethnic conflicts seem to persist, and appear, in fact, to be on the rise in many parts of the world today. Why do ethnic groups persist in maintaining their century-old sentiments of in-group solidarity? And why, of all places, is the relatively peaceful country of Jordan a place to look for answers to these global concerns? I would like to take up this last question first, as it can be answered quite quickly.

There are several reasons why Jordan is a good place to examine the question of how and why ethnic solidarities persist. The first is the fact that its resident Arab population has had to cope with nearly four millennia of foreign domination and ethnic encounters, from the Egyptians in the second millennium B.C. to the British and Americans in the present century. The second is that, compared to most other regions in the world, Jordan is quite unique in the extent to which its archaeological past, as it pertains to the history of the indigenous population, has been uncovered. And third, due to the country's proximity to Egypt, Israel, Syria and Mesopotamia, ancient textual accounts exist which refer to events which took place in Jordan in antiquity and thus add further to our ability to research ethnic encounters and cultural changes through the centuries and millennia.

What I will attempt to do in this paper, then, is to posit the existence of a complex of attitudes and practices by means of which the indigenous population of Jordan has managed to survive and persist despite the comings and goings of foreign governments and rulers. What I mean by "indigenous population" is the people of Arab origin - bedouin and fallahin - who have considered Transjordan as part of their homeland territory. I shall refer to these posited practices and attitudes as Jordan's "indigenous hardiness structures." What I mean by this term, and its implications for state formation in Jordan, will be explained further on.

Geographical considerations

Three geographical factors are important to reckon with in order to understand Jordan's two-layered history: namely that of its resident Arab population and that of its transient foreign masters.

The first is the semi-arid to arid climate, which has made scarcity of water a constant threat to the inhabitants of the region since Neolithic times. In Jordan it rains primarily between November and March, while the months of June through September are almost always completely without rain. Thus people have been forced either to rely on perennial springs and streams for their year-round water needs or to build and maintain cisterns, reservoirs and aqueducts for collecting and storing winter rains. An alternative option has been to adopt a transhumant lifestyle and migrate with herds of animals between highland and lowland pastures and depending on both springs and cisterns for water.

The second is the country's proximity to the Arabian and Negev deserts. For example, Jordan's entire eastern boundary is located along the frontier of the Arabian desert, while its southern frontier faces the Negev desert along its western boundary. This nearness to the desert has presented both opportunities and threats to the resident inhabitants of Jordan. On the one hand, when there has been sufficient winter rains, these deserts present attractive grazing opportunities for pasture animals. On the other hand, when rains have been insufficient, desert dwelling pastoral nomads are forced to spend longer periods with their herds in Jordan's well-water western highland, thus putting pressure on the region's settled population. The desert has also presented a convenient place to escape to for persons or whole tribes in time of conflict and as a means of resisting the heavy hand of foreign rulers.

The third geographical factor upon which much of Jordan's history pivots is the country's position astride one of the world's most important landbridges - the one which connects North Africa with Europe, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and much of the far east. Together with the coastal plain of western Palestine, the western highland plateau of Transjordan have for centuries and millennia provided armies, caravans and people groups with a corridor along which to pass in order to avoid having to traverse the desert. One of the reasons for the region's being under almost continuous control of foreign masters since the second millennium B.C. is precisely because of the vital importance of this communication and transportation corridor to the ambitions and designs of foreign rulers to the south, east and north.

Together, these three geographical factors provide a set of common denominators for understanding Jordan's history since the dawn of civilization down to the present. I shall turn next to explaining something about the specific multi-disciplinary research project by means of which this research on the history of Jordan's indigenous population is being carried out.

The Madaba Plains project

The region with which this project has been concerned is the Madaba Plain, located in the highlands to the east of the northern tip of the Dead Sea. In addition to the town of Madaba, well known for its Byzantine mosaics, this region includes Mount Nebo, Hesban, Um el Amad and many lesser known Jordanian villages and towns. It is a region mentioned in the Old Testament in stories involving the Moabites, the Ammonites and the Israelites. It also contains ruins of importance to our understanding of the Greco-Roman, Byzantine and Islamic centuries in Palestine.

The event to which the Madaba Plains Project traces its origins is the launching of the Heshbon Expedition by Siegfried H. Horn of the Theological Seminary at Andrews University in 1968. As its name suggests, this expedition had as its original mission not to study the history of Jordan's indigenous inhabitants, but to excavate Tell Hesban to see what light, if any, it could shed on biblical stories about the conquest of the Heshbon region by the Israelites (Numbers 21; Joshua 13). That the present-day site of Tell Hesban had once been the Heshbon mentioned in the Bible in connection with these events is a claim which most biblical scholars had taken for granted when the project began.

Given the original mission of the Heshbon Expedition, what was produced by the excavations at Tell Hesban was not what had been hoped for. Instead of extensive remains from the biblical periods, the site produced a prolific quantity of material from the Greco-Roman (ca. 200 B.C. to A.D. 600) and especially the Ayyubid-Mamluk (ca. A.D. 1200 to 1450) periods. Fortunately, this situation did not lead to abandonment of further research at this site. Instead, it catalyzed re-thinking of the objectives of the entire project. Out of this re-thinking emerged the Madaba Plains Project which has identified as one of its explicit research foci to investigate the history of Jordan's resident Arab population.

More specifically, what led to this new focus was the dilemma of how to account for shifts over time in the extent to which Tell Hesban was settled and in the intensity with which its surrounding region had been occupied. The picture which our research had brought to light was that of a region undergoing repeated cycles of filling up and emptying out of traces of permanent settlements. Did people simply abandon the region during the emptying out phases of these cycles, or did they convert to nomadic ways which left few archaeological traces? Were the people who settled down during the filling up phases of these cycles the descendants of the region's pre-existing nomadic population or were they primarily immigrants from elsewhere? What was the role of successive central government apparatuses on the one hand, and of tribal polities on the other, in facilitating these changes? These are the sorts of questions which preoccupy much of the current research of the Madaba Plains Project.

The Food Systems Methodology

Crucial to the research which now is being carried out by the Madaba Plains Project is what I have elsewhere called food systems research (LaBianca 1990; 1991). A few of the assumptions which underlies this methodology need therefore to be made explicit.

One such assumption is that what most people in the past spent their time doing concerned, in one way or another, the daily tasks of maintaining their food procurement arrangements. A second is that, of all the activities the majority of men, women and children engaged in the past, none were more instrumental in producing the archaeological record than those related to the maintenance of these arrangements. A third is that the various activities involved in the quest for food are somehow systematically related.

This last assumption is, in fact, integral to the definition of the food system concept: A food system is a dynamic and complex unity consisting of all the purposive, patterned and inter-dependent symbolic and instrumental activities carried out by people in order to procure, process, distribute, store, prepare, consume, metabolize and dispose of food (LaBianca 1990).

Pivotal to understanding the dynamic aspects of food systems variability are the concepts of intensification and abatement. As we have explained elsewhere (LaBianca 1990; 1991), these concepts give an idea of the direction of variability in terms of the extent to which a given region is managed or exploited for purposes of providing its inhabitants with food, shelter and water. Generally, as a region's food system intensifies, its inhabitants tend to become increasingly land-tied due to increased investment in plough agriculture. Consequently their residential patterns tend to become more sedentary. Intensification, therefore, normally is accompanied by sedentarization.

Abatement is said to occur when a given region's inhabitants diminish their reliance on plough agriculture in favor of livestock production within a given territory or homeland. This generally involves adoption of more mobile residential patterns, or nomadization, whereby people, for the sake of their increased investment in pasture animals, turn to seasonal migration between watering places, ploughlands and pasturelands within a given territorial homeland.

The field procedures employed by the Madaba Plains Project in gathering and processing data relevant to its study of food systems and the phenomenon of sedentarization and nomadization include, as already indicated, excavations of several major tell sites, excavations of several smaller hinterland sites, archaeological surface surveys, investigations of pertinent historical texts and documents, and ethnographic inquiries among present-day inhabitants of the project area. To these may be added specialists' studies of various assemblages of artifacts such as pottery, stone objects, metal objects, human skeletal material, animal bones, carbonized seeds, and so on.

These various lines of inquiry contribute in different ways to reconstruction of changes over time in the extent to which people invested in ploughlands or pasture animals. For example, investment in ploughlands is reflected archaeologically in renewed settlement activity in formerly inhabited tell sites; restoration of cisterns, terraces and watch-towers in the hinterlands of such sites; occurrence in the animal bone samples of larger quantities bones of draft animals, and so on.

Typically such activities slack off during periods when investment in pastoral activity is on the rise. During such periods, people become more mobile, living in tents and caves in different locations according to seasons. Archaeologically, they leave comparatively fewer traces, although investigations of camping sites, burial sites, storage depots and herding stations provide valuable clues to the populations' activities during such periods. I would refer to our seasonal reports for much more extensive discussion of our methods and results (Geraty et al. 1987; 1989; Geraty and LaBianca 1985; LaBianca 1990; and Herr et al. 1991 for full details of our work).

Jordan's Two-layered History

It is when attempts are made to explain why these cycles of sedentarization and nomadization have occurred in Jordan that we come face to face with the fact that the country's history has two layers: an upper layer consisting largely of the history of the country's foreign occupiers and a deeper layer consisting mostly of the history of its indigenous Arab inhabitants.

When tourists visit Jordan, for example, what they are typically shown is the former: the remains of the Roman cities of Philadelphia (Amman), Geresa (Jerash) and Gedara (Um Qais), of the Byzantine Christian churches at Madaba and Mount Nebo, and of the crusader castles at Kerak and Shoubak. Even Petra tends to be presented to tourists in light of its Hellenistic upper layer, not in terms of its deeper Nabatean Arab history.

While in the past, this upper layer of Jordan's history was also the primary concern of Western and Jordanian scholars as well, this situation has now changed. As was clearly attested at the recent world congress of Jordan archaeologist and historians in Torino, Italy, the deeper layer concerned with the history of country's indigenous population from Neolithic to Islamic times is now clearly beginning to be exposed and studied.

As already indicated, both of these two layers of Jordan's past must be uncovered and analyzed in order to account for the cycles of sedentarization and nomadization which have occurred here over the past four millennia. On the one hand, it is necessary to investigate the political and economic agendas of the region's foreign occupiers in order to understand why the area was either invested in or neglected. On the other hand, it is equally important to examine the nature and extent of cooperation and/or resistance put forth by the local Arab population in response to each successive wave of foreign domination and control. As will become clearer further on, it is to a large extent the synergistic dynamics of these two sets of factors - along with the three geographical factors mentioned earlier - which account for the cycles of sedentarization and nomadization in Jordan's past.

Four Millennia of Foreign Cccupation

The fact that research on Jordan's past has tended to be concerned with the thin veneer represented by its upper layer history is attributable to at least three major reasons: the first is the monumental nature of the remains produced, for example, by the Romans at Jerash, by the Byzantines at Madaba; by the crusaders at Kerak and Shoebak; the second is the availability of archival materials by these occupiers which offer insight into why and how the region was occupied; and the third is the obvious interest of Western scholars in those aspects of Jordan's history which cast light on the roots of Western civilization.

From an archaeological standpoint it is also true that each wave of foreign domination is easier to detect than is the case with indigenously produced materials. Distinguishable, for example, in the pottery from Jordan is the influence of the Egyptians in the second millennium B.C.; the Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks in the first millennium B.C.; the Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads and Abbasids from the first century A.D. and the Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans and British from the second millennium A.D.

The agendas of these various foreign powers are also attested in other ways, as for example by the Roman's concern with building amphitheaters, reservoirs, roads and temples; or by the Byzantine's concern with building Christian churches; or by the Ummayad's penchant for constructing hunting lodges; or by the Crusader's obsession with building castles! The grand scale of some of these undertakings, and the remarkable extent to which many of them are still preserved in Jordan today makes it easy to understand why the upper layer of Jordan's history has received more attention than its deeper layer - that of its Arab inhabitants.

The History of Jordan's Indigenous Population

As already indicated, the history of Jordan's resident Arab population is not attested to the same degree either by historical records or by archaeological remains. To uncover it, we have had to come up with novel approaches, the most important of which has been, as mentioned earlier, to focus attention on the local food system - on the traces of ephemeral villages, camping sites, burial sites, storage facilities, and animal pens located in the agricultural hinterlands of the major tell sites with which our project has been concerned. Another important line of evidence has been ethnohistorical and ethnoarchaeological research concerned with the recent past of the project area. By means of such studies we have been provided with helpful clues as to where to direct our searches as we probe to discover clues from the more distant past relative to this deeper layer of Jordan's history.

Perhaps the most significant result of these inquiries to date is what we have discovered about the extent to which continuity has prevailed when it comes to the material culture repertoire of Jordan's resident Arab population. As we have become more deeply acquainted with their history, we have begun to understand the reason for this continuity. It has to do with the priority which Jordan's resident Arab population has given to preserving future options over all other concerns. This concern led early on in their history to practices and attitudes which together constitute what we have begun to refer to as Jordan's "indigenous hardiness structures." I turn next to describing some of these structures.

Jordan's Indigenous Hardiness Structures

Thus far we have been able to delineate a cluster of seven interrelated institutions by means of which Jordan's indigenous population has managed to assure preservation of future options in an unpredictable natural and social environment. I turn next to briefly describing each one.

Tribalism

First, and most important by far, is tribalism, by which I simply mean a flexible polity involving strong in-group loyalty based on variously fluid notions of common lineal descent. As I have discussed elsewhere (LaBianca 1995), this type of polity has provided indigenous Jordanians with a highly flexible system of local level political organization by means of which small groups of kin have been able to adjust consistently and successfully with political and economic domination and change. Based as it is on the principle of claimed common lineal descent, it has provided the enabling sociocultural mechanism by means of which individual households and whole tribal sections have been able to shift back and forth between sedentary and nomadic ways.

Multi-resource Economy

By this I mean the practice of engaging in a variety of subsistence oriented as well as surplus producing economic activities (cf. Lancaster 1994). For example, when it comes to land use, four strategies have traditionally been pursued: cereal agriculture, tree fruit production, sheep and goat herding, and camel herding. While individual household and even sections of tribes may specialize somewhat with respect to certain ones of these strategies, the norm has been for a certain amount of crop production to be practiced right along side of animal production. Other sources of income may also be pursued, notably trade in stable goods and exotic wares and wage labor.

Fluid Homeland Territories

In order to be able to pursue such a variety of economic options, fluid homeland territories have been preferred over fixed ones. Although a somewhat fixed center of gravity may prevail, the outer boundaries of homeland territories are continually changing to accommodate new social, economic or environmental realities. By this means tribal groups have been able to insure against losses due to environmental or sociopolitical setbacks and to expand opportunities for trade and cooperative relationships where desirable.

Residential Flexibility

Along with a multi-resource economy and fluid homeland territories have come residential flexibility in terms of the type of shelters used. To this end, a variety of habitations have been utilized over the centuries which include stone houses, residential caves and tents. Some groups have also utilized ancient ruins as temporary habitations, including ancient Roman tombs and cisterns and the standing ruins of Crusader castles and Umayyad hunting lodges. During much of the Ottoman period, the majority of Central Jordan's population lived in make-shift cave villages during the winter months. These villages were located nearby fertile agricultural lands on which cereals were produced. Families would abandon these villages during the drier parts of the year and follow their flocks of animals to more distant pastures.

A consequence of the co-occurrence of the processes of sedentarization and nomadization among Jordan's tribal peoples is that residential patterns representing different segments along the sedentism-nomadism continuum have co-existed in varying proportions in time and space. In other words, at any given point in time and space, nomadic, seminomadic, semisedentary, or sedentary groups have lived together in different numbers (see Gubser 1984: 24-25 for a succinct description of each of these terms). What has changed over time and space is the extent to which each has been represented proportionally.

Low-care Water Sourcing

Because of the risks involved in constructing and maintaining the sorts of high care water sourcing systems developed by, for example, the ancient Romans in Jordan, such systems been avoided by the country's indigenous population. Instead, they have preferred to rely on low-care water sourcing arrangements - access to natural springs and streams and re-use of ancient cisterns. A limited amount of investment has at times been made in terracing and related earthworks.

Hospitality

The emphasis on hospitality for which the Arab population of Jordan is famous has its roots in more than good manners. By means of this institution, vital information is shared between members of tribes and outsiders. Hospitality also facilitates "story-telling" by means of which members of tribes have been reminded by traveling "story tellers" of their common values; informed of new opportunities by traveling merchants; and warned of threats to their security and way of life by distant members of their tribe or visiting strangers. The institution, therefore, played a crucial practical role in maintaining solidarity between members of the tribe and in facilitating the transmission of information vital to groups solidarity and survival.

Honor

The institution of honor, similarly, has a practical function as well as a moral one! Its practical function has been to provide a method of social control whereby tribes persons have been able to police themselves without actually having to rely on a paid police force. While there is much more to the institution than this, this function alone makes it a critical one to the goal of maintaining order without having to rely on externally imposed systems of law and punishment.

To these seven institutions others could and no doubt will be added. The point here is that these are examples of institutions which have evolved among Jordan's indigenous peoples as a means to survive centuries and millennia without having to rely on centralized bureaucratic structures. They have, in other words, made the people "hardy" - able to survive all kinds of challenges to their autonomy and traditional way of life.

Indigenous Hardiness Structures and State Formation

One of the consequences of the operation of these age-old institutions in Jordan over the centuries and millennia has been that they have made it extremely difficult for state-level polities to take root and persist. Indeed, in the case of Jordan, the synergistic impact of these institutions has tended to be that of corrrosive agency - an agency which has gradually worn down and in the long run out-lasted the aspirations of foreign-imposed state-level polities. It is for this reason that Jordan's history has consisted of an upper layer of transient state-level polities and a deeper layer of grass-roots tribal organization based on persistent, ancient notions of claimed common lineal descent. The cycles of sedentarization and nomadization which have characterized the region's history are merely the material manifestation of successive attempts at state formation and centralization which ended in dissolution due, in part at least, to the hardiness of Jordan's resident Arab population.

It is interesting to note that at crucial times in their history, these indigenous inhabitants have succeeded in mounting their own supra-tribal state-level organizations. The two instances that come to mind is the formation of the Ammonite, (and also the Moabite and Edomite) state during the first half of the first millennium B.C. and the formation of the Hashemite state in the present century. Significantly, both of these indigenous state level systems functioned largely on the basis of tribal ideology. That is to say that both are examples of tribal kingdoms - polities in which tribal identity is the primary vehicle of political consciousness. Furthermore, in both cases, it has been the threat presented by the neighboring state of Israel that fueled the push toward formation of these indigenous states.

Conclusion

As far as Jordan is concerned, I feel the posited existence of such hardiness structures is well on the way to being understood and documented. Whether, as I have suggested, the search for similar such structures in other parts of the world may illuminate the roots of local ethnic solidarities and conflicts is a question that I now posit for this audience to consider. I look forward to receiving your critical comments and discussion.

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Contact the author: Øystein S. LaBianca