Beyond the Railway

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the discoveries of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) from the conflict landscape of the Hejaz Railway. A decade in the desert revealed the anthropological archaeology of the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 to be more than the excavation of historically recent places or the survey of ruinous station buildings. It was rather an interdisciplinary study of the railway’s heritage from 1900 to the present, its role as a catalyst in creating a unique conflict landscape, and its intriguing relationships with earlier Hajj routes. The railway was also entangled with the beginnings of modern guerrilla warfare, the creation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and a complex and sometimes volatile mix of traditional Bedouin culture, modernity, religion, and local and national politics. Furthermore, the Revolt itself was embedded in the wider regional and geo-political framework of the First World War and its many aftermaths: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of the modern Middle East; the rise of Arab Nationalism; the Second World War; the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq; the destructive legacy of the Islamic State’s short-lived Caliphate announced in 2014; and Syria’s descent into a tortuous and tragic civil war.

The Hejaz Railway

This chapter focuses on the Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway is a unique archaeological and anthropological object, created for different reasons by various financial means from across the Muslim world—from faith-based donations and taxation, to the selling of archaeological heritage, and from the manufacture of stamps and honours to the acquisition of sheepskins. These resources were transmuted, in a sense recycled into rail tracks, embankments, bridges, station buildings, and rolling stock—all underwritten by imperial-military, regional, and geo-political realities cloaked in religious intent. Even the route was hybrid, a palimpsest belonging, variously, to prehistoric, Nabatean, Roman, and Byzantine trade pathways; Ottoman Hajj roads; and railway modernity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as the railroad moved through this millennia-old landscape, it became a catalyst for conflict, embedded in a war which changed the region and the world.

Archaeology, Material Worlds, and the Arab Revolt

This chapter looks at how the timely development of an interdisciplinary archaeology (modern conflict archaeology) of the First World War from the late 1990s offered a comprehensive and nuanced way of investigating the many interlocking military and cultural aspects of the Arab Revolt and its aftermath. Ephemeral archaeological traces in the sands of southern Jordan, it was hoped, would speak to the origins of modern guerrilla warfare which itself contributed to the shaping of the Middle East after 1918. The new approach showed the power of objects to create and transmit impressions and evaluations of the Revolt and its personalities—not least by the catalysing effects of finding similar items during excavations of the original landscapes whence all such objects derived their historical significance. The desert, so apparently empty of information and insight, would prove to be full of both. The key to deciphering its archaeological message lay in understanding the landscape, its layers and its objects—a quest which began with the largest artefact of all, the Hejaz Railway.

Into the Ghost-land

This chapter describes the arrival of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) archaeologists at the derelict Hejaz Railway—GARP’s main study area—which snakes across the deserts and wadis of southern Jordan, from the medieval town of Ma’an to the Bedouin settlement of Mudawwara near the border with Saudi Arabia. There was an enchantment of the senses in finding traces of the world’s first global industrialized conflict alongside those of deep prehistory, churned together it seems by the advent of modern guerrilla warfare, where time is built into the relationship between metal and rust. The sand itself has been touched, blown, and sifted by history, from Nabatean spice traders to Hajj pilgrims, from Ottoman Turkish troops to the Bedouin. Each of these experienced the desert in their own way, and like others in distant parts of the world, brought their own magical thinking to bear on their surroundings. Indeed, the empty desert is anything but, and the ruins of the Arab Revolt emerge from it as a unique heritage of the modern world.

Concealment, Raiding, and Ambush

This chapter looks at the Tooth Hill campsites, which were a grail of modern conflict archaeology, as they preserved the faintest traces of military activity in a vast and hostile desert, and others probably lay undiscovered in-between Tel Shahm and Mudawwara. They are the rare imprint of the origins of modern mobile guerrilla warfare which shaped so many military actions across the twentieth century, and into the present. However, guerrilla warfare against the Hejaz Railway achieved arguably its most spectacular success not against a station but in what would later be regarded as a classic ambush. The Hallat Ammar ambush was about metal—trains, track, mines, and munitions—and so metal-detector survey was invaluable. No identifiable trace of the looting of the train was found, though the large quantity of railway debris had doubtless been sifted, robbed, and moved around in the intervening years. Indeed, despite its isolation, the archaeology of the ambush site could not be the pristine remains of the Arab Revolt, but rather, as elsewhere, a layering of the intervening century’s activities, disturbing, overlaying, and obscuring some of the events of the attack.

‘Belly of the Beast’

This chapter examines the complex site of Batn al-Ghoul Station, in all probability spanning the prehistoric to modern periods due to its strategic location half-way between the high plateau and low-lying sandy wadis. This position was liminal for pre-modern societies, which have been shown in the discussion of the myths and superstitions it attracted for Muslim pilgrims on the Hajj, who regarded it as the Belly of the Beast. Its choice for the railway descent around 1900 was pragmatic, offering the only feasible place where tracks could be laid, albeit in a wide curving arc and with huge preparatory efforts in re-shaping the local geography. Batn al-Ghoul’s three campsites belong to the construction era, though some re-use during the Arab Revolt is probable, and Bedouin re-use throughout the twentieth century is certain. The archaeological evidence indicates that Bedouin favour the more substantial tent-rings for their brief re-occupations. Despite its vulnerable location during the construction era and the Arab Revolt, the only clearly defensive feature was the Batn al-Ghoul Loop Trench. Despite this, the loop trench is an example in miniature of Turkish efforts to protect the Hejaz Railway from guerrilla attack.

Guerrillas and the ‘Sultan’s Mule’

This chapter addresses how the First World War revitalised the Hejaz Railway, but not always as the new Turkish government, their German allies, or the British could have foreseen. No one could have predicted the role the faithful railroad would play in the coming conflict, its momentous consequences, or its galvanizing role in creating modern guerrilla warfare. And nobody, let alone the recently volunteered intelligence officer 2nd Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, could have recognized that Abdulhamid II’s dream railway would be a catalyst for the modern legend of Lawrence of Arabia. The railroad had been a strategic artery since its inception. Despite Ottoman emphasis on its religious role, and its economic and cultural effects along its route, there had always been a geopolitical dimension, as it bypassed the Suez Canal and threatened British India and the Far East. Yet there was nothing inevitable about a war fought along its length. The railroad was to be an unexpected proving ground for a new form of conflict with global reach based on a modern adaptation of traditional Bedouin raiding, itself honed by centuries of attacking Hajj caravans.

Forts, Stations, and Ancestors

This chapter focuses on Wadi Rutm Station and Tel Shahm Station. Tel Shahm Station and its landscape is characterized by several types of militarization—tent-ring campsites, a fortified hilltop and blockhouse, shadowy remains of defensive trenches around the station, and a karakoll strong-point further south. It is possible that the anomalous northernmost tent-ring campsite is a mix of prehistoric, railway construction-era, and Arab Revolt-period occupation, and that the southern construction camp saw later re-occupation between 1917 and 1918. The hilltop blockhouse, its perimeter wall, and the observation posts are clear examples of Turkish militarization, reinforced by the munitions found at those posts facing the railway, indicative of outgoing Turkish rifle or machine-gun fire. Together with the shattered railway tracks down on the desert, it is likely that much of the archaeology of this multi-component site belongs to the Arab Revolt.

Conflict on Jebel Sherra

This chapter explores the town of Ma’an, the largest and most sophisticated conflict landscape of the Arab Revolt in the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) study area. It is the site of the largest set-piece battle of the campaign east of the Jordan River, where 4,000 Ottoman troops faced 3,000 Arabs in a fierce five-day struggle. In this respect, it was an anomaly—a true battle in an otherwise mainly guerrilla campaign. Ma’an Station and its hinterland was an archaeological challenge as well. The station itself was surrounded by extensive Turkish earthwork defences—crenelated trench systems interspersed with karakoll hilltop defences—sitting within what is still an active training ground for the Jordanian Army. However, the evidence was mounting that the defence of the railway was a very late affair, that it could be dated to within a few months, and that it had an instructive relationship with the earlier defences of the construction era.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP). GARP was an interdisciplinary study of forgotten war places—the first archaeological-anthropological investigation of a modern guerrilla landscape whose physical traces belonged to the First World War and the Arab Revolt, but also to the long tail of twentieth- and twenty-first-century guerrilla warfare. It was an archaeology which had not been attempted before, and which took place against the background of the American-led Coalition which was occupying Iraq—a nation itself created in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in which the Arab Revolt had played such a prominent role. The archaeology of the Arab Revolt sites reflects the apparent randomness of the surprise attacks launched on the railway by the Arabs and British. While some sites were created by such raids, more often they were a response to the threat of them. Ultimately, this was an investigation of what asymmetrical warfare looked like on the ground—the archaeology of a desert insurgency and of Ottoman Turkish counter-insurgency measures.