Petra, Jordan

This was a great place for GPR, and general archaeological site seeing!

here I am at the "Treasury" at Petra.

There is an area called the "Lower Market" that has in the past been assumed to be just that, because it is flat and mostly devoid or architecture.   Leigh-Ann Bedel excavated there in the summer of 2000 and found what appears to be water works and perhaps a pool and associated garden of Roman age.  But are there other hidden features below?  Yes!  It is amazingly complex.  Here is one of the really nice structures we found 

It turned out to be Byzantine in age.  The others  nearby appear to be Roman.  But there are lots of other walls and structures that remain to be tested.  We did, however, have a whole bunch of local Bedouin workers that were more than willing to immediately excavate what we found, which gave us some "immediate gratification", not usually found in most GPR projects.  Best of all, our field interpretations proved to be correct, as all the buildings were found right where the GPR said they would be.

To read about the GPR work we did at this site in detail, there is an on-line article with lots of images and photos, published by the Society for American Archaeology on-line journal E-tiquity.

And there was always time at Petra to do some fun things too!  Like riding camels through the site at sunset.