Dhiban: Valuing Sites Through Valuable Stories

The aim of this project is to strengthen the local stewardship of Tall Dhiban, a large mound 70 kms south of Amman Jordan, by enhancing its economic and social value. This will be achieved by increasing local connectivity with the site and improving on-site interpretation and management. Tall Dhiban is well-known as capital of the biblical kingdom of Moab and the find spot of the Mesha inscription (now in the Louvre), the longest Iron Age royal inscription from the Levant. Despite the strong historical narrative and biblical connections provided by the Mesha Inscription, the site is seldom visited by tourists and is poorly understood by local residents because the visible archaeological remains are difficult to interpret and partially obscured. Modern Dhiban is an adjacent Bedouin town of the Bani Hamida tribe that has been the site of economically motivated civil unrest since at least 2011. This unrest has led to increased looting of Tall Dhiban as well as violent confrontations between police and protestors on the site itself in 2016. This project aims to transform the site of Tall Dhiban into a cultural resource for the building of positive local heritage identities, as well as an economic resource for local businesses by increasing the number of external visitors to the site. In doing so, we also aim to build capacity in Jordan for public history and the management of cultural heritage sites. This will be pursued with a two-fold strategy. In town we will run a schools based public history programme working with teachers and Mutah University trainee researchers. This project will culminate with a History Festival, in which student family history projects and social media will be used to encourage residents of Dhiban to contribute their own stories, images and artefacts. A repository of these materials will be turned over to the community for self-directed public history projects in future. One emphasis of this public history project will be on the relationship between the town, tribe and the tell (archaeological mound) of Dhiban.
On the tell itself we will work with Hashemite University students to prepare a site management plan and interpretive signs and related materials for presenting the site. We will also instigate a programme of site maintenance and cleaning, and the establishment of visitor pathways. Through a Jordanian non-profit (SELA Training) we will provide a nationally recognised vocational training programme in basic conservation techniques for dry-laid stone architecture to four unemployed youths from Dhiban, which should allow them to find more regular and better paid employment within the heritage sector in Jordan. It will also provide us with skilled technicians to help stabilise the exposed architecture from various phases of Dhiban's 5,000 year settlement history. Current visitor numbers for Tall Dhiban are very low, hence we expect that any improvement to the presentation of the site will lead to a proportionately significant increase in visitors and external income. It will also allow Tall Dhiban to be a potential stop on developing day-tour circuits within the Madaba Governate, where one already finds two UNESCO World Heritage Sites and several important concentrations of mosaics.
The site will also serve as a point of integration between often intagible local historical narratives and the global and national narratives that dominate archaeological interpretation. Academically, we will trial best practices for realising this integration, articulating the histories of the town and the tell as intertwined and continuous. If successfully presented, the site will become easier to integrate into local cultural and educational activities and provide a more diverse and nuanced experience of Jordan for foreign tourists. It is already evident that engaging with recent histories will challenge academic approaches to tell sites that do not analyse them as places that are still in formation.

This project offers five forms of societal impact. 1)Economic impact, aimed directly at Dhiban's youth unemployment and poverty rates, which are amongst the highest in Jordan. Short-term, this grant will provide £36,592 in direct employment income to residents of Dhiban, as well as c. £43,000 of other expenditures in Jordan. This will be leveraged by a further £32,609 in wages committed by the DoA for Dhiban in 2019, providing bridging employment between our two periods of peak activity. Four unemployed youths will receive vocational training leading directly to a 50% pay rise while working for us and the potential for future skilled work on other projects. Longer term, developing the interpretive infrastructure of Tall Dhiban promises a proportionately significant increase in external visitors, given the current low base and the continuing international interest in the Mesha Inscription. For example, the Rough Guide to Jordan (2016) dedicates an inset to the Mesha Inscription but describes Dhiban as "...an ordinary working town with few frills..." and does not mention the site at all. Increased visitorship will provide increased footfall for businesses selling food, drinks and petrol as well as transport across the Wadi Mujib via private car hires. It also increases the viability of new business ventures oriented towards cultural heritage tourism. To help raise awareness we will hold an open day on site for hotel owners and tour operators based in the regional tourism hub of Madaba. In conjunction with the Department of Antiquities we will commission articles in Jordanian newspapers and other media outlets. Saeb Rawashdeh a journalist for the Jordan Times has already contacted the UK PI looking for news items on Dhiban.
2)Social cohesion and positive community identity formation. As a town at the centre of recent civil unrest in Jordan, there are on-going tensions within Dhiban regarding the cosmopolitan orientation of elites in Amman and the realities of life in the Bedouin south. Tall Dhiban is symbolic of this divide as the site is in the midst of the town but owned by the government and excavated by foreign academics. Facilitating the gathering and celebration of local cultural heritage and presenting it as an integral part of the story of an internationally known archaeological site can play a part in easing some of these tensions. All of the 7 feature signs will make some reference to the modern town and two will feature the history of the Bani Hamida heavily.
3)Capacity building in cultural heritage management and public history. The four young people trained as conservation technicians by SELA will receive a government recognised vocational training course and will be of immediate use to the Dhiban Project because of their acquired skills. Students from Hashemite University and Mutah University will receive training and practical experience directly relevant to their degree programmes. 3-4 Hashemite University Architecture students will use either the site management plan or the development of graphics for the interpretive signs as part of their Senior Research projects.
4)Visitor experience. At present the site of Dhiban is undeveloped and somewhat chaotic. Visitors who are not deeply familiar with the published excavation reports from the site can make little sense of the visible remains. Cleaning the site, consolidating architecture, establishing vistor pathways and producing on-site interpretive signs will completely change this experience, making the remains intelligible to any interested visitor.
5)Site preservation and management. The increased coherence of the site will make it much easier for the Department of Antiquities (DoA) to monitor the site condition and plan for its continued protection and development over the long-term. This will be facilitated by the site management plan that our partners at the DoA will take forward at the end of the project.