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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.

Portable Near Infrared Micro-Raman (NIR μ-Raman) spectroscopy was used, as a preliminary and non-destructive technique, in order to investigate the mineralogical composition of a group of pottery sherds from Khirbat Iskandar, Jordan. Preliminary results show that the ceramic body is composed mainly of quartz, calcite, and minor amounts of feldspars and hematite. In addition, the presence of Olivine and anatase, important markers to identify the provenance of raw materials, was detected. Furthermore, the occurrence of Portlandite was related to both rehydration of calcite and burial alteration processes. Finally, a study of Raman spectrum of Amorphous Carbon, identified as temper in the clay, was performed to estimate the manufacturing parameters (maximum temperature and permanence time).

13 pages, 8 figures., A statistical analysis of the orientation of Nabatean sacred monuments demonstrates that astronomical orientations were often part of an elaborated plan and possibly a trace of the astral nature of the Nabataean religion. Petra and other monuments in the ancient Nabataean kingdom have proven to be marvellous laboratories for the interaction between landscape features and astronomical events, showing impressive hierophanies on particular monuments related to cultic times and worships. Among other findings, the famous Ad Deir has shown a fascinating ensemble of light and shadow effects, perhaps connected with the bulk of Nabataean mythology, while from the impressive Urn Tomb, a series of suggestive solstitial and equinoctial alignments emanate which might have lately helped its selection as the cathedral of the city. This paper demonstrates that the sky was a substantial element in Nabataean religion and reveals new evidence for cultic worship centred on the celestial sphere.

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.

In 2015 the Italian Archaeological Expedition to Niĝin (Southern Iraq) started the exploration of the site of Tell Surghul (Dhi Qar province). Excavations concentrated on two main operations (Areas A and B), while a survey was conducted along the western border of the site (Area C). In the present article, the epigraphic findings (inscribed cones and bricks of Gudea) from the south and south-east areas of Mound A in Area A are analysed: inscriptions document the building activity of Gudea with the construction of the temple Sirara for the goddess Nanshe that probably occupied the top of Mound A.

The study of cultural heritage can take advantage of modern non-destructive analysis technique able to identify, among the others, the composition of the investigated ancient artifacts. In the present paper we applied Raman spectroscopy to analyze selected Mesopotamian materials from Kish kept in the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford to investigate the pottery technique of that ancient people, with particular reference to the painting procedure. Beside the use of hematite and gypsum as red and white pigments respectively, the use of a near infrared laser excitation allowed to detect the presence of specific compounds applied at the pottery surface. Residual traces of the used oil were detected thanks to the fingerprint vibration at 1870 cm − 1 which is ascribed to the C C stretching of the cyclopropenoid compound of some fatty acids and, in particular, assignable to the use of oils derived by sterculiaceae and malvaceae plants. By using DFT calculations we simulated the degradation process of the hypothesized initial oil and we propose the attribution of the final compound revealed by Raman analysis. From the reported experimental results we propose that the oil was applied all over the surface of the pottery as a primer before the painting decoration with the use of the dry oil technique.

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.