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The Arab Revolt of 1916–18 played a significant part in the military collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. This chapter argues that archaeological evidence indicates that the revolt's importance was probably substantially greater than has sometimes been acknowledged. The evidence demonstrates the need for a critical re-evaluation of the issue in southern Jordan. The archaeological investigation of sites associated with the Arab Revolt in southern Jordan offers dramatic insights into the material consequences for the Ottoman army of combating the guerrilla tactics of British-backed Arab guerrillas. The aim of the discussion is twofold: to give more precision to the military assessment of the Arab Revolt in the area between Ma'an and Wadi Rutm, and to demonstrate the potential of the new and multidisciplinary sub-discipline of twentieth-century ‘conflict archaeology’.

Those active in the Zionist movement to colonize and develop the Land of Israel were determined to develop a new and modern Jewish culture that would serve as a corrective to the image of the Diaspora Jew as weak, pale, timid and afraid. The new Zionist Jew would be strong, confident and effective, and the very act of developing the Land of Israel would in turn develop the Jewish psyche and person. As one slogan put it, “we have come to build [the Land] and be built up by [building] it.” This very assertiveness contributed to the tension with the local Arab population, which resented the arrival of confident newcomers who wished to radically change the environment of Palestine. Thus began a conflict that would break out periodically and increasingly into violence directed against the Jewish newcomers. The Jews were determined to demonstrate that they were not typical “Diaspora Jews” who could be pushed around, so they escalated the tensions through their aggressive response. Thus a movement that did not consider itself violent or militant became increasingly so as the years progressed.

Chapter 5 charts the effects of these developments as the power system, upon completion in 1932, gained technological momentum, cementing the worldview and power relations it had participated in producing. The 1930s saw rapid industrial growth in the Jewish community and simultaneous economic decline and political realignment in the Palestinian Arab community, especially during the years of the Great Arab Revolt, 1936–1939.

This chapter chronicles the changes to the various meanings of citizenship and civic identity during the three years of the Palestinian Arab Revolt. Effectively, citizenship claims became rather ‘stalled’ in Palestine upon the outbreak of the nationwide revolt against the British. Rural rebels and revolt commanders co-opted certain claims, which in turn influenced newer meanings of patriotic loyalty and practices of citizenship. In particular, the Peel Commission report, which offered recommendations on policy in Palestine following the initial disturbances, is described in terms of its impact on citizenship in order to offer a historical explanation of the continuities and changes of both the British and the Arabs' perceptions of nationality, citizenship and rights by 1937.

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the discoveries of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) from the conflict landscape of the Hejaz Railway. A decade in the desert revealed the anthropological archaeology of the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 to be more than the excavation of historically recent places or the survey of ruinous station buildings. It was rather an interdisciplinary study of the railway’s heritage from 1900 to the present, its role as a catalyst in creating a unique conflict landscape, and its intriguing relationships with earlier Hajj routes. The railway was also entangled with the beginnings of modern guerrilla warfare, the creation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and a complex and sometimes volatile mix of traditional Bedouin culture, modernity, religion, and local and national politics. Furthermore, the Revolt itself was embedded in the wider regional and geo-political framework of the First World War and its many aftermaths: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of the modern Middle East; the rise of Arab Nationalism; the Second World War; the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq; the destructive legacy of the Islamic State’s short-lived Caliphate announced in 2014; and Syria’s descent into a tortuous and tragic civil war.

Chapter Five addresses the backlash against Britain’s selective approach to colonial development, focusing on Haifa and the Dead Sea as important sites of Arab Palestinian contestation to British rule. In Haifa, the rapid emergence of an Arab proletarian underclass meant that the city became a focal point of unrest in the second half of the mandate years, especially during the national revolt of 1936–39. At the Dead Sea, meanwhile, a similar opposition existed which was expressed at various levels, ranging from an international legal challenge, to Arab nationalist protest, to the efforts of a locally based Arab entrepreneur, Ibrahim Hazboun, to be included in Britain’s Dead Sea development scheme. The final stages of the chapter complete this picture by detailing the violence that erupted at Haifa and the Dead Sea during the dying days of British rule, leaving these once exemplary imperial achievements mired in destruction by 1948—potent symbols of the failures of British development.

This chapter looks at how the timely development of an interdisciplinary archaeology (modern conflict archaeology) of the First World War from the late 1990s offered a comprehensive and nuanced way of investigating the many interlocking military and cultural aspects of the Arab Revolt and its aftermath. Ephemeral archaeological traces in the sands of southern Jordan, it was hoped, would speak to the origins of modern guerrilla warfare which itself contributed to the shaping of the Middle East after 1918. The new approach showed the power of objects to create and transmit impressions and evaluations of the Revolt and its personalities—not least by the catalysing effects of finding similar items during excavations of the original landscapes whence all such objects derived their historical significance. The desert, so apparently empty of information and insight, would prove to be full of both. The key to deciphering its archaeological message lay in understanding the landscape, its layers and its objects—a quest which began with the largest artefact of all, the Hejaz Railway.

This chapter explores the town of Ma’an, the largest and most sophisticated conflict landscape of the Arab Revolt in the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) study area. It is the site of the largest set-piece battle of the campaign east of the Jordan River, where 4,000 Ottoman troops faced 3,000 Arabs in a fierce five-day struggle. In this respect, it was an anomaly—a true battle in an otherwise mainly guerrilla campaign. Ma’an Station and its hinterland was an archaeological challenge as well. The station itself was surrounded by extensive Turkish earthwork defences—crenelated trench systems interspersed with karakoll hilltop defences—sitting within what is still an active training ground for the Jordanian Army. However, the evidence was mounting that the defence of the railway was a very late affair, that it could be dated to within a few months, and that it had an instructive relationship with the earlier defences of the construction era.

No territory was more central to the mandates system than Palestine. Britain had always insisted that its Palestine policy be approved in Geneva, and went to some lengths to secure international support for a Zionist pledge that its allies initially thought misguided. In the 1930s, however, this ‘internationalization’ of Palestine policymaking lessened Britain's room to manoeuvre. As the 1929 riots and the 1936 Arab Revolt revealed the depth of Arab opposition to continued Jewish immigration, British statesmen looked first for new ways (including partition) to balance both communities' claims, and then to retreat from the Balfour pledge. Yet, most members of the Mandates Commission, as well as increasingly anti-Semitic East European statesmen, had come to see Palestine largely as a destination for European Jews and opposed any such moves. This chapter tracks that complex history, showing how the inflexibility fostered by ‘internationalization’ drove a number of British statesmen to condemn a mandates regime they had largely created.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP). GARP was an interdisciplinary study of forgotten war places—the first archaeological-anthropological investigation of a modern guerrilla landscape whose physical traces belonged to the First World War and the Arab Revolt, but also to the long tail of twentieth- and twenty-first-century guerrilla warfare. It was an archaeology which had not been attempted before, and which took place against the background of the American-led Coalition which was occupying Iraq—a nation itself created in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in which the Arab Revolt had played such a prominent role. The archaeology of the Arab Revolt sites reflects the apparent randomness of the surprise attacks launched on the railway by the Arabs and British. While some sites were created by such raids, more often they were a response to the threat of them. Ultimately, this was an investigation of what asymmetrical warfare looked like on the ground—the archaeology of a desert insurgency and of Ottoman Turkish counter-insurgency measures.

This chapter examines the complex site of Batn al-Ghoul Station, in all probability spanning the prehistoric to modern periods due to its strategic location half-way between the high plateau and low-lying sandy wadis. This position was liminal for pre-modern societies, which have been shown in the discussion of the myths and superstitions it attracted for Muslim pilgrims on the Hajj, who regarded it as the Belly of the Beast. Its choice for the railway descent around 1900 was pragmatic, offering the only feasible place where tracks could be laid, albeit in a wide curving arc and with huge preparatory efforts in re-shaping the local geography. Batn al-Ghoul’s three campsites belong to the construction era, though some re-use during the Arab Revolt is probable, and Bedouin re-use throughout the twentieth century is certain. The archaeological evidence indicates that Bedouin favour the more substantial tent-rings for their brief re-occupations. Despite its vulnerable location during the construction era and the Arab Revolt, the only clearly defensive feature was the Batn al-Ghoul Loop Trench. Despite this, the loop trench is an example in miniature of Turkish efforts to protect the Hejaz Railway from guerrilla attack.

This chapter focuses on Wadi Rutm Station and Tel Shahm Station. Tel Shahm Station and its landscape is characterized by several types of militarization—tent-ring campsites, a fortified hilltop and blockhouse, shadowy remains of defensive trenches around the station, and a karakoll strong-point further south. It is possible that the anomalous northernmost tent-ring campsite is a mix of prehistoric, railway construction-era, and Arab Revolt-period occupation, and that the southern construction camp saw later re-occupation between 1917 and 1918. The hilltop blockhouse, its perimeter wall, and the observation posts are clear examples of Turkish militarization, reinforced by the munitions found at those posts facing the railway, indicative of outgoing Turkish rifle or machine-gun fire. Together with the shattered railway tracks down on the desert, it is likely that much of the archaeology of this multi-component site belongs to the Arab Revolt.

This chapter approaches the events and trends that defined the fall of Ottoman rule in the Arab-speaking provinces in the aftermath of the First World War. As in the Balkans and North Africa, war, diplomacy, and revolt helped to terminate Istanbul’s dominion over the Levant, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. As in other parts of the old Ottoman world, foreign occupation and partition, as opposed to mass uprisings or nationalist opposition, led the vast majority of Arabic speakers to sever ties with the Ottoman state. However, reigning suspicions among leading Young Turk leaders, as well as the popular enmity born out wartime shortages, famine, and political oppression, made the departure of the Arab lands particularly acrimonious.

This chapter begins with the Italian invasion of Libya, which reinvigorated the Pan Islam movement, and the French decision to impose military conscription on Algerian Muslims, which set off a new wave of hijra to the east. It moves through World War I, when Algerians served as soldiers and workers in France, and Islamic movements stirred rebellions in the Sahara. During the war, the French organized a pilgrimage to Mecca for North African Muslims, led by Algerians. The Algerian community in Syria was a lively environment, the scene of a debate over whether to trust English support for the Arab Revolt or attempt to negotiate with Young Turk authorities, and of a dynamic movement to promote Muslim girls' education led by Naziq al-̓Abid. On the final day of the war a grandson of ̓Abd al-Qadir who had worked with T.E. Lawrence, then turned against him, was killed by Sharifian forces in Damascus.

This chapter examines the fate of Sharif Husain of Mecca after the Arab Revolt. It explains that the sharif trusted the British, who later abandoned him, causing him to be driven out of the Hijaz by the Su'udis in 1924. The chapter suggests that what the sharif regarded as Britain's betrayal of himself and the Arabs was a pivotal point in the modern history of the Middle East.