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The MRAMP represents an American-Italian-Jordanian collaboration dedicated to protecting cultural heritage in Jordan. The proposed new Regional Archaeological Museum within the Madaba Archaeological Park West is an ambitious project to restore and safeguard a complex of Jordanian traditional buildings from the late nineteenth-century Ottoman era within a museum. The complex will ultimately constitute the ground floor while the contiguous “Burnt Palace,” Roman cardo, and Martyr's Church will round out an envisioned museum complex. Thanks to a dozen or more regional archaeological sites, the museum will provide a comprehensive narrative of the Madaba region's illustrious past and its legacy to the dynamic present. To preserve Jordan's rich heritage, this project is founded in community archaeology, which is essential to ensure the development, continued growth, and sustainability of the museum. This article will elaborate on MRAMP as a case study of an innovative approach in Jordan to cultural heritage management.

Cuneiform tablets tell the life and culture of Sumerian people in a sort of black and white tale because of the binary engraving technique. A leading question arises: did Mesopotamian people apply some kind of colour to decorate their tablets or to put emphasis on selected words? Some administrative and literary Sumerian cuneiform tablets of mid-third Millennium B.C. from the site of Kish (central Mesopotamia, modern Iraq) were dug up in twentieth-century and stored at the Ashmolean Museum of the Oxford University. Non-destructive micro-Raman spectroscopy is a powerful technique to detect the presence of residual pigments eventually applied to the engraving signs. Yellow, orange, red and white pigments have been detected and a possible identification has been proposed in this work. In particular yellow pigments are identified as Crocoite (PbCrO4), Lead stannate (Pb2SnO4); red pigments − hematite (Fe2O3) and cuprite (Cu2O); White pigments − Lead carbonate (PbCO3), calcium phosphate (Ca3(PO4)2), titanium dioxide (TiO2), gypsum (CaSO4.2H2O); orange pigment a composition of red and yellow compounds. These results suggest that Sumerian people invented a new editorial style, to overcome the binary logic of engraving process and catch the reader’s eye by decorating cuneiform tablets. Finally, the coloured rendering of the tablet in their original view is proposed.

The article presents the results of the 2013 Spanish-Italian Archaeological Expedition to Jebel al-Mutawwaq, an Early Bronze Age I village and dolmen field along the Middle Wadi az-Zarqa Valley (Jo...

Orientation studies have recently received considerable attention in the archaeological domain as a source of information that may shed light on a number of anthropologi- cal issues, such as belief systems or landscape and territory understanding by past cultures. This is especially important in those cultural contexts, such as the megalithic phenomena, where there are no written sources. Megalithic monument orientations can in many instances be explained only within an astronomical context, as has been shown by extensive archaeoastronomical fieldwork surveys and by statistical approaches to the problem., This work has been partially financed within the framework of the projects P/309307 Arqueoastronomía of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and Orientatio ad sidera III (AYA2011-26759) of the Spanish MINECO. ACGG is Ramón y Cajal researcher of MINECO. AP would like to acknowledge the support of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.