| Site Description | Madaba is the capital city of Madaba Governorate in central Jordan. The city is best known for its Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics, especially a large Byzantine-era mosaic map of the Holy Land. The area of the Madaba Archaeological Park West was excavated by several archaeological expeditions over several decades, uncovering the main buildings in the area: the Roman Cardo, the Burnt Palace and the Martyrs Church of the Byzantine Period, and the remains of different Islamic buildings overlapping to the earlier structures in the northern area of the archaeological park. In the past, the area of the Madaba Archaeological Park West has been intensively excavated by F. Michele Piccirillo on behalf of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (1985) and Cherie Lenzen (1992-1993), administered by Pierre Bikai, Director of ACOR, on behalf of USAID, and Ghazi Bisheh (1993-1994) on behalf of the DoA and ACOR. The final publication of the results of the more recent expeditions is due to appear in 2017 in an ACOR publication by Robert Schick, who agreed to share his pre-publication data with the team of the MRAMP 2016 Pilot Season |
| Project Description | Dr Robert Bewley is the Director of the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME). This is long-term research project founded by David Kennedy and based at the University of Sheffield (1978-1990 and then the University of Western Australia (1990-2015). In 2015 it moved to the University of Oxford (School of Archaeology). Since 1998 it has been directed by Professor David Kennedy and now Dr Robert Bewley. The project is designed both to develop a methodology suited to the region, discover, record, monitor and illuminate settlement history in the Near East. The archive currently consists of over 115,000 (mainly aerial) images and maps, the majority of which are displayed on the archive’s Flickr site. Although principally focused on Jordan, in which there has been an annual programme of flying since 1997 (The Aerial Archaeology in Jordan (AAJ) Project), high resolution satellite imagery on Google Earth is now permitting research on neighbouring countries.
The photos collected of downtown Madaba were collected from a helicopter in October 2019 by Dana Salameen, Pascal Flohr and Robert Bewley. |