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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.

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.

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 describes the arrival of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP) archaeologists at the derelict Hejaz Railway—GARP’s main study area—which snakes across the deserts and wadis of southern Jordan, from the medieval town of Ma’an to the Bedouin settlement of Mudawwara near the border with Saudi Arabia. There was an enchantment of the senses in finding traces of the world’s first global industrialized conflict alongside those of deep prehistory, churned together it seems by the advent of modern guerrilla warfare, where time is built into the relationship between metal and rust. The sand itself has been touched, blown, and sifted by history, from Nabatean spice traders to Hajj pilgrims, from Ottoman Turkish troops to the Bedouin. Each of these experienced the desert in their own way, and like others in distant parts of the world, brought their own magical thinking to bear on their surroundings. Indeed, the empty desert is anything but, and the ruins of the Arab Revolt emerge from it as a unique heritage of the modern world.