Impacts of imperialism: Nabataean, Roman, and Byzantine landscapes in the Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan

The Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey is an interdisciplinary investigation of settlement and land use history in the desertic Wadi Faynan, from the beginning of the Holocene to the present day, as a contribution to understanding processes of desertification and environmental degradation in arid lands.-The wadi is now used only by pastoralists on seasonal basis, but its rich archaeological record indicates that the locality has also been the focus at different times in the past not just for pastoralism but also for sedentary settlement, intensive floodwater farming, and copper and lead extraction and processing on a major scale. The paper focuses on the Nabataean and Roman/Byzantine periods (ca. 300 B.C.-A.D. 700), to illustrate how an integrated program of landscape archaeology and environmental science is defining changing patterns of arable, pastoral, and industrial activity in classical antiquity, and how Roman imperialism transformed the landscape, with effects that still impact on the lives of the present-day Bedouin pastoralists.