Station: [11] Excavations in Umm Saisaban

The desert city of Petra is certainly the most spectacular excavation undertaken by the Natural History Society’s Department of Archaeology Abroad, but it’s not the only one by a long shot!

In 1983, Manfred Lindner discovered an Early Bronze Age settlement site north of Petra called Umm Saisaban. It dates from about 3,100 to 2,700 BC. In 1988, Lindner led the first excavations with a team from our Natural History Society. Since 2011, Professor Ulrich Hübner from the Institute for Biblical Archaeology at Kiel University in northern Germany has been in charge of the excavations.

Umm Saisaban is a Canaanite settlement on a plateau in the midst of a mountain landscape that’s partly volcanic in nature. Deeply carved wadis – dry river valleys – border the plateau. There’s an eastern and a western area. The western part is dominated by a striking rocky ridge around which the houses were grouped. Despite the erosion, the site was still recognisable and a comprehensive record of it was made. The type of house was in the same style as the Arad House from a contemporaneous town in Israel’s Negev desert.

Since 2011, our excavations have focussed on House 20 and House 30, which are only separated by an alley. In House 20, large potsherds from big storage vessels were found, but there were no small utensils of daily use, such as, for example, a rectangular Egyptian slate palette for cosmetics. That find is a prestige object and provides a clear indication that there were trade relations with Egypt.

House 30 was also fully excavated. One unusual architectural feature suggested that the former owner may have been a prominent citizen – a dual level stone bench running along three sides of the interior. Finds included large ceramic vessels, stone lids for pots, mortars, querns, small vessels, flakes of flint and a stone vessel made of basalt.

The houses were only temporarily inhabited to store products from seasonal rainfall agriculture and livestock. The site was cleared, abandoned, destroyed and not resettled even before the end of the prehistoric period.