Water in the Desert: Human Resilience in the Azraq Basin and Eastern Desert of Jordan

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Water in the Desert: Human Resilience in the Azraq Basin and Eastern Desert of Jordan" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For thousands of years, plants and animals including humans moved back and forth along the Levantine corridor—a geographic region that connects Africa to Eurasia. At the margin of this corridor lies the Azraq Basin in the Eastern Desert of Jordan, which previously had extensive spring-fed wetlands at its center. These wetlands remained intact until the early 1990s when the combination of climate change and years of water overdraw led to desiccation of the springs. This session explores human resilience in the face of climate change and documents the shifting relationships between people, plants, animals, and objects in this challenging ecosystem from the Lower Paleolithic to historic times.