#000615
Jawa: Lost City of the Black Desert
S. W. Helms
The story of one of archaeology's genuine oddities: a sophisticated fourth-millennium-BC town that flourished briefly in the black basalt desert of northeast Jordan, then vanished. Svend Helms, who directed the excavations, recounts how aviators first spotted Jawa's ruins in 1931 and how digs in the 1970s revealed a walled settlement of some twenty-two acres, complete with an ingenious water-storage system that let thousands survive in a place of sandstorms and killing extremes. Published by Cornell University Press in 1981, the book is both an excavation report made readable and a meditation on why people build cities where they seemingly should not. It speaks to readers who love ancient engineering, desert landscapes, and the puzzle of a civilization that left almost no successors.
more…less ▴
The author
S. W. (Svend) Helms was the archaeologist who directed excavations at Jawa between 1972 and 1976, having first visited the site in 1966. A specialist in the ancient Near East, he wrote the site's principal synthesis and made a technical excavation accessible to general readers.
The book
Published by Cornell University Press in 1981, it describes Jawa's discovery, fortifications, town plan, and above all its remarkable water-catchment and storage engineering, which supported a large population in one of Earth's harshest settings. Because no later town was built atop it, Jawa is among the best preserved Bronze Age cities known.
How it has aged
The narrative and the site's importance endure, though scholarship has moved on: later fieldwork and publications have refined the chronology and interpretation of the Black Desert's early settlement. Read Helms for the gripping first account and the engineering story, and supplement with newer surveys for current dating.
For more context
The Wikipedia entry on Jawa and the Near Eastern Archaeology Foundation give updated overviews of the site and subsequent work.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- S. W. Helms
- Publisher
- Cornell University Press
- Place of publication
- Ithaca, New York
- Year
- 1981
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado