Jawa Lost, Jawa Found

The approach to Jawa. Those are the city walls in the distance.In his blog post from June 3, Yo recounts an interesting adventure with AMP and JK to Qasr Burqu and the search for the Bronze Age site of Jawa. As Yo mentioned Jawa was excavated by Sven Helms (see Jawa: Lost City of the Black Desert, 1981) in the 1970s and it claims to have one of the earliest sophisticated water management systems in the world (3000 BCE). Jawa is out in the eastern desert of Jordan up near the Syrian border. Due to the fact that Yo had experienced a previously failed attempt to find the site we got up extra early to set out, so early that there was still frost on the truck:Here Mo is using a credit card to scrape the ice from the windshield. After getting a little lost in East Amman (we definitely needed the navigation skills of JK here in East Amman) we managed to find our way to Azraq, with a couple of pit stops at Quranah (our friend L's site) and some weird structures in Azraq. Then it was off to find Jawa. Armed with a great set of Google earth maps supplied by our friend SR from the CBRL we had no trouble finding the site after about a 45 minute drive across the arid basalt landscape. YEAH! we found it, we promptly celebrated by having a lunch of tinned sardines, mandarin oranges and dates - very Christmassy. This is the landscape approaching the site.After lunch we went off to poke around the site and found some very impressive walls and structures and a lot of recent evidence of looting. This site is in the middle of nowhere and doesn't really have all that impressive artifacts on the surface and yet there were a lot of looter's holes. Here are some images of looting at Jawa. Jawa was much more impressive than either of us expected. We were very glad to finally make it to the site.