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Jordan is a fusion of cultures, and its history offers layers of civilizations. Its geographically privileged position has made it a nexus of the Levant, Arabian Peninsula, Asia, and Africa, and this resulted in many of the world’s great civilizations seeking to expand their power in and control over it. Consequently, over the centuries many castles and fortresses have been constructed in Jordan. These structures are believed by some to be the best indications of political situations, economy, social lives, and cultures in every period of time: they were symbols of power and reflections of conflicts, victories, and defeats (Al-Momani 1987). Today, a considerable number of castles in Jordan dating to different historical periods—especially those from the crusader and Islamic periods—are still in good condition and are open to tourists, archaeologists, and researchers. They present an integrated picture of history of the country and the whole region, varying in features and facilities, depending on the place and time in which each was built.

Crusader castles were built to defend against the most advanced siege techniques of the time. In some cases, halls were surrounded by earthen embankments of great strength to improve defensibility. This can be seen, for instance, at Al Shawbak castle, which was founded on an isolated hill in a watered and settled valley (Kennedy 2001).

Later, when Muslim forces seized power over the region and the situation became more stable, some castles became the residential palaces of rulers or governors, and new ones were constructed to perpetuate the memory and names of their builders with written inscriptions (Al-Momani, 1987. Umayyad caliphs reused some existing castles, including those at Kharana and Muaqqar, as caravan khans. They also used Roman castles at Hallabat and Azraq—and they built new ones, too, such as those at Mushatta and Tuba, which are rare structures that bear witness to the uniqueness of the Umayyad civilization (Ilayan 2003). The function and usage of these desert castles expanded beyond military purposes. Muslim rulers employed these fancily decorated yet forceful structures to show off their power, to monitor transportation routes, to protect trade caravans, and to serve as rest houses (Al-Momani 1987).

Built by crusaders in the mid-12th century, Kerak Castle is one of the most historically significant sites in Jordan. From its founding into the 20^th century, it was an administrative, economic, and defensive center in the southern Transjordan region. After the crusaders lost it in the late 12th century, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman rulers used the castle and added more substantial architectural features to its main building (Jordan Times 1989). All of this has made it a “living witness” to each of these successive civilizations.

From another period with its own fascinating architecture is Qasr Al-Mushatta, considered to be the largest and most ambitious of the Umayyad palaces in Jordan. Built in the 8th century, the palace is surrounded by a 144 m² wall with twenty-five semicircular towers. Its stone facade is exquisitely decorated with delicate and varied geometric, faunal, and floral motives carved in relief (UNESCO n.d.). Entering the palace, you witness its spectacular remains, which are a unique example of Islamic architecture, with a most sophisticated and regular plan. And you will wonder how amazing it would have looked if the palace had been completed (Khoury 1988)! For all of these reasons, Qasr Al-Mushatta was inscribed on the World Heritage Tentative List in 2001 and hopefully will soon be named a World Heritage Site.

Due to the significance and beauty of the historic fortresses in Jordan, immense efforts have been undertaken to preserve, interpret, and present these majestic structures for tourists and the local community. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, in cooperation with the American Center of Research and other Jordanian and foreign institutions, led projects to conserve the inherited treasures of Jordan’s castles.

In the ACOR Digital Archive, we have astonishing photos of these castles in several collections and spanning many years. They are open access, for all to see, and you are all invited to have a look and discover how these sites had changed over the decades.

خوري، رامي. (1988). القصور الصحراوية. ترجمة: غازي بيشه. الكتبي، ناشرون

المومني، سعد. (1987). القلاع الإسلامية في الأردن: الفترة الأيوبية المملوكية. دار البشير للنشر.

Ilyan, Jamal. 2003. “New ‘System’ of Presentation of Umayyad Desert Castles in Jordan. Integral Museum of Umayyad Civilization.” In ICOMOS 14th General Assembly and Scientific Symposium, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, 27-31 October 2003: Place, Memory, Meaning—Preserving Intangible Values in Monuments and Sites.Victoria Falls: ICOMOS.

Jordan Times. 1989. “More Riches at Kerak Castle.” Jordan Times, 17 May 1989, p. 3

Kennedy, Hugh. 2001. Crusader Castles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNESCO. n.d. “Qasr Al-Mushatta.” UNESCO Tentative List.

Today, Dr. Barbara A. Porter is the ACOR Ambassador, the first and only person to be awarded this title, in honor of her deep commitment to the American Center of Research, where she served as director from 2006 to March 2020.

By the time she became director, her experience in the region had already stretched back decades, into her childhood. She lived in Lebanon from 1965 to 1970, an experience that greatly influenced her passion for archaeology.

She went on to receive her master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University, served as a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curatorial staff, and taught at New York University.

In 1977 she was invited to excavate in the Jordan Valley, and during that time she resided at the very center that, almost three decades later, she would guide for fourteen years. Under her leadership, the American Center of Oriental Research (as the American Center of Research was then known) was a beacon of stability and underwent a period of growth that prepared it for the new era of global interconnectivity we experience today. 

One of the many projects of Dr. Porter’s tenure was the ACOR Photo Archive, launched in 2016 with support from a four-year American Overseas Research Centers (AORC) Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Now known as the ACOR Digital Archive, it would come to include among its substantial holdings thousands of photographs taken by Dr. Porter herself and by her parents, Dwight J. and Adele Porter.

Besides her work in museum galleries, university classrooms, and the American Center, Dr. Porter has led tours throughout the region. Travels have taken her to Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tunisia, Iran, and Libya, and she documented with her camera what she saw. (The proportion of her collection representing each of these countries is represented by the graph below.)

The subjects encompass not only archaeological sites and objects in museums but also ethnography—the daily modern life going on around the sites and in the cities and towns she visited. Souks and mosques, mosaics and tiles, doorways and columns, food vendors and tourists all attracted her lens. 

The entire Barbara A. Porter collection comprises some 50,000 photographs. These are being digitized and uploaded to the ACOR Digital Archive through yet another AORC Title VI grant, in which metadata for the images is being made available in both English and Arabic.  

In addition to her considerable photographic collection, Dr. Porter has also donated printed materials to the American Center of Research Library. These range from scholarly volumes on Near Eastern, Egyptian, and North African archaeology to tourist brochures covering locations—archaeological and otherwise—in Jordan and elsewhere in the region.  

As ACOR Ambassador, Dr. Barbara A. Porter continues to represent the American Center of Research. And, through her photography, the Barbara A. Porter collection offers glimpses into her lifetime of dedication to Jordan and the interconnected region, past and present.  

Announcing the ACOR Digital Archive:
Developing a Multimedia Teaching and Learning Resource

By Jessica Holland, Archival Projects Consultant. First published January 6, 2021 on ACOR Announcements. Republished as an ACOR Photo Archive photo essay on April 29, 2021.

We are delighted to announce that, based on the success of the ACOR Photo Archive Project to digitize and make available online 30,000 images covering a range of thirteen countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded ACOR an American Overseas Research Center (AORC) Title VI grant for a new project entitled “ACOR Digital Archive: Developing a Multimedia Teaching and Learning Resource.

What will the ACOR Digital Archive include?

The ACOR Digital Archive will make over 18,000 digital objects of interest to students and scholars of the Middle East freely available and will engage 10,000 U.S. educators of diverse backgrounds with archival resources. The project will digitize archival materials of interest stored on legacy media formats, such as Betamax and VHS, and will share these openly online for the first time. Our archives include rare audio and video recordings of lectures stretching back to the 1980s, as well as project documents relating to landmark excavations, such as the Petra Church Project, which will be digitized and made available to all, without charge.

Photographs from countries where U.S. researchers face restrictions on funded travel, such as Syria, Libya, and Tunisia, will be prioritized for digitization to help support scholars unable to conduct their work in person. Many of these photos will come from ACOR Ambassador Barbara A. Porter’s photograph collection. Photos from archaeologist Brian Byrd will also be digitized, including historic action shots of the discovery and removal of the Ain Ghazal statues for conservation and study. By 2024, the ACOR Digital Archive will have made almost 50,000 digital objects available for anyone to search, share, and reuse.

“ACOR offers key resources for the Middle East. Its holdings of visual resources, particularly the photo archive, is a significant resource for scholars worldwide. The proposed project would take advantage of previously and currently funded projects to further disseminate ACORs’ holdings.” 

—Anonymous peer reviewer, 18 May 2020

The ACOR Digital Archive website will be fully accessible in both languages. We will increase the amount of Arabic-language description of our archival materials through the project, responding to a growing demand for MENA materials to be accessible in both English and Arabic. As one of our proposal’s anonymous peer reviewers put it: “[L]anguage learners have a need for high-quality, free content for integration with their courses.” We wholeheartedly concur and look forward to bridging this gap for both second-language speakers and archival users in the region.

Educator Fellowships

Through the expanded project, we will engage new audiences and better serve current users by working with U.S. educators to develop curricular materials (including lectures, lesson plans, syllabi, and interactive media). Our collections—multimedia documentation of the region’s cultural, natural, and material heritage and development—will be made available with corresponding educational resources relevant to subject areas within the humanities and social sciences, as well as subjects with a broad global comparative perspective, such as sustainability, ecology, anthropology, art, tourism, and heritage.

A key component of the project will be the establishment of educator fellowships, which will serve as opportunities for faculty at community colleges, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to develop teaching resources relevant to their courses based on our archival materials. These practical, freely available curricular materials will be widely circulated within community college and MSI networks.ACOR typically provides resources to more than 13,000 North American, Jordanian, and international researchers and students annually, and with this project’s proposed outreach to 10,000 MSI, community college, and HBCU faculty members, we expect to significantly expand our engagement with U.S. educators, providing long-term benefits for public understanding of the Middle East.

Why are online archives important?

Online archives are essential for researchers focused on the Middle East to continue to advance knowledge and deepen understanding about the region, as access to physical archives may be restricted or unobtainable, especially for U.S. nationals, due to travel prohibitions and funding limitations.

Accommodating both area studies and global education courses

Preserving access to archival materials just one step. Without sustained engagement with institutions that activate these resources, digitization efforts can easily fail to meet their goals of breaking down barriers to information. With interest in the region intensifying, Middle Eastern studies faculty face high demands from their students and from the media for public education on controversial contemporary issues.¹ Our digital archive recognizes the need to support both in-depth area-studies education and broad global comparative education programs, providing links between potentially disjointed areas of research. The archive will soon serve as a ready resource for time-constrained instructors to draw from when preparing lectures and other educational materials on critical regional topics, useful in both subject-specific and global studies courses.

“The assertive outreach planned for community colleges and minority serving institutions reflects comprehensive insights into US higher education.” 

—Anonymous peer reviewer, 18 May 2020

“[T]here is a need for better materials for international and global course content, as well as ready-made materials for use by non-experts.”

—Anonymous peer reviewer, 18 May 2020

Resources for Arabic as a foreign language educators (U.S.)

In a recently published study using the U.S. Department of Education Evaluation of Exchange, Language, and International and Area Studies (EELIAS) database, Elizabeth Worden and Jeremy Browne (2018) demonstrate the “disconnect” between the demand for proficient speakers of Middle Eastern languages and the ability of Title VI centers to produce them, particularly at the master’s level.²

Online open-access platforms lack archival resources related to the Middle Eastern region that are accessible in both English and Arabic. This is an obstacle for U.S. educators teaching Arabic and their students who rely on archives to carry out their research and assignments. Navigating websites entirely in Arabic for the first time is daunting for any beginner- or intermediate-level Arabic student. Similar challenges are faced by upper-intermediate and superior-level Arabic students when they make their initial attempt to access technical archives in the Middle Eastern region, particularly when the sole language of cataloging and reference is Arabic.

Among the relatively few other archives beginning to address the need for dual-language interfaces are the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digital Library of the Middle East, NYU Abu Dhabi’s Akkasah archive, and the Arab Image Foundation, all of which launched Arabic-language interfaces in 2020.

Our online archive is already a key resource for scholarship on the MENA region, but through the ACOR Digital Archive project (2020–2024), it will become a critical tool for U.S. educators seeking to deliver a global education.

1. Shami and Miller-Idriss 2018. 

2. Worden and Browne 2018. 

References

Shami, Seteney and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (eds.). 2018. “Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle Eastern Studies.” In Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (eds.), Middle Eastern Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge, 1–30. New York: New York University Press.

Worden, E., and J. Browne. 2018. “Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11: ‘Needs’ and Challenges.” In Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (eds.), Middle Eastern Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge, 225–250. New York: New York University Press. 

ACOR Photo Archive Project 2016-2020: Building a Valuable Resource for “a Diverse, International Community”

By Jessica Holland, Archival Projects Consultant, First published January 25, 2021 on ACOR Announcements. Republished as an ACOR Photo Archive photo essay on April 29, 2021. 

“To reproduce an object is a task that requires know-how, but to understand what the object represents, its function or how it came to be, requires another kind of knowledge.”

—Akram Zaatari, Against Photography (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2018, p. 103)

Achievements: reflections on four transformative years

Prior to this project, ACOR’s archival photographs lingered in the basement—undisturbed and uncataloged—for years, in formats that, in terms of modern library usage, were rapidly becoming inaccessible. Since the launch of the photo archive platform in 2017, these images have been in constant use by high-school and university students, professors, researchers, publishers, and prestigious institutions, such as the Smithsonian. In 2020, the photo archive processed its largest ever image request, providing an extraordinary 700 images to the Living Museum of Umm Qais project. ACOR’s archival materials have gone from being under threat of disintegration and all but out of reach to being digitally preserved and regularly accessed by over 6,500 distinct users each year.

One of the most significant achievements of this project was the creation of an authority list that for the first time compiles all major transliterations and Arabic-script versions of more than two hundred prominent heritage site names in Jordan. This list, made open access for other projects to benefit from, incorporates internationally recognized standards—including the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Library of Congress naming authorities, and local taxonomies (such as those of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and Royal Geographic Society)—and thus provides previously disconnected data in one place.

In order to encourage scholarship based on ACOR’s archival materials, an exhibition and fifteen photo essays were published on the project website to provide context about the collections, greatly exceeding the project goal of only ten essays. Some are interviews with distinguished archaeologists, among them Nancy Lapp and Bert de Vries. Others draw out themes from among the images, such as the feminist history of archaeology and community heritage. People beyond ACOR are following suit with their own such works. In 2019, Boston College’s undergraduate journal of Middle Eastern studies, Al Noor, published a photo essay of Jane Taylor photographs from Mada’in Al-Saleh in Saudi Arabia.

Presentations designed to increase awareness of the photo archive have been given in the U.S. six times (including twice virtually), in Jordan eleven times, and twice in other international venues (London, Athens). Four video lectures, including one in Arabic, have been produced and shared widely online. These can be viewed on the ACOR YouTube channel. Once again, the project’s efforts far exceeded its stated goals, which were to give two U.S. and two international presentations. We are proud to have reached a much broader audience.

Building an interconnected community of practice

The ACOR Photo Archive was made possible through self-reflective collaboration. Although originally envisioned to solely make ACOR’s archival images available to academics and professionals, the project ended up interacting with a far broader audience. This was due to the variety of people who worked on the archive taking time to listen to what was important about the archive with respect to each other’s area of specialist knowledge and membership of different (potential user) communities. By listening to these insights, we were able to make decisions about the design of the online archive that would make it accessible to a range of international groups of differing education levels—from scholars to schoolchildren. Project archivists with master’s degrees in library and information studies (MLIS) and in digital humanities, museum studies, and the history of photography hailing from the U.S. and the UK worked together with Jordanian-Palestinian librarians and digitization technicians with in-depth archaeological knowledge of Jordan and the wider Middle East to produce an archive that was suited to the Jordanian context.

The ACOR library and archival team sought to share the archival knowledge they themselves were gaining through the project at every stage. A newly initiated program of digitization internships brought students and graduates from around the region to participate. In Jordan, ACOR is one of the few institutions offering such training, which directly helps to advance the field in the country. Since 2017, ACOR has run workshops on archival methods that have been instrumental in building an archival community of practice in Jordan and the wider region. Attendance trebled in three years, with sixty-five gallery, library, archive, and museum professionals from eighteen institutions participating in 2019. As a result of these initiatives, ACOR has become a hub for capacity-building in archival skills.

The photo archive team also sought to share lessons learned throughout the project by participating alongside peers and leaders in the field at the Council on Library and Information Resource’s Digital Library Forum 2019, as well as by bringing North American and international experts to Jordan.

All of these collaborations matter because decisions taken at the metadata level inform how digital objects are presented to—and therefore are understood by—both local and international communities. In the postcolonial context of overseas research centers such as ACOR, this is a significant responsibility. Consequently, the photo archive that this multicultural team produced is “fit for purpose” for promoting understanding of Jordan and the region locally and far beyond.

Arabic-language accessibility

In the course of the project, the team became increasingly aware of the limitations of the original project scope with regards to the language that would make it possible to sift through the 31,000-photo archive to locate images of a particular place or topic. As in the world of print publication, the digital humanities landscape has been dominated by the English language. As a result, English-language scholarship often provides the default references.

Translating the analog photographs to a digital existence on the open internet wasn’t enough to ensure sufficient access to the wide range of stories they had to tell. We needed to seize this opportunity of funded, focused efforts to literally translate the textual data they offer: the handwritten English-language notes of photographers and scholars that we were transcribing had to be translated into Arabic. We then needed to synthesize these notes in both languages into the mechanism for finding information online: search terms or keywords.

Through efforts pioneered by ACOR library staff, this two-step translation process, which provides rich information in Arabic as well as English, was given its initial trial run through the Madaba photo series within the Rami Khouri collection. This had great results but took double the time to produce the metadata, even though the academic texts consulted for the captions were available in Arabic, a rarity for cultural heritage texts.

The types of limitations we were encountering aren’t unique: digital humanities is an emerging field facing up to its inherited problems worldwide. However, as ACOR is a research center dedicated to supporting knowledge development within the postcolonial context of Jordan, it was vital for our team to deconstruct barriers blocking equitable access to archival material upon which further knowledge may be produced, whether in the form of academic scholarship or public history.

Engagement

In order to begin dismantling such structural inequalities, we built outreach and engagement into every activity. Making a resource open access isn’t enough—you need to actively encourage use, recontextualization, and reinterpretation of the images. Since the project’s launch in 2017, we have invited many different voices to interpret the archival records.

When the first Jordan School Librarians Conference was held in 2018, we jumped at the chance to tell these vital conduits of knowledge about the resource ACOR offered for Jordan’s heritage, a subject that makes up a significant part of the middle- and high-school national curriculum. In turn, this engagement exposed us to the needs of these new user groups. We added a “citation template” section for each photo in order to clearly communicate how students could reuse photos with appropriate attribution. As children began to use the archive as a research tool, they benefited from our reliable information source for their school projects, such as on Petra, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Wikipedia

It is difficult to overestimate the need for accurate open-access information sources in Jordan, so, using ACOR’s archives, the team worked to create a comprehensive data set about Jordan’s heritage sites. This in turn became the foundation for contributions to the world’s largest source of open-access information: Wikipedia. For our first in-house “edit-a-thon,” held in 2019, we collaborated with Wikimedia Levant, the Jordan Open Source Association, and photographer Bashar Tabbah. Fifty members of the public, spanning generations, attended, among them students, professionals, and retirees, all wanting to contribute to how their heritage was being framed online. The success of this event led ACOR to establish a Wikimedians in Residence program. We have now held four edit-a-thons and contributed 45,500 words to the Arabic and English Wikipedia websites. For more about our Wikipedia initiatives, check out “’Open Jordanian Heritage’: Wikimedians Share Stories of Editing Online.”

The SCHEP Photo Archive

Based on the experience gained through creating the photo archive, ACOR and the USAID Sustainable Cultural Heritage through Engagement of Local Communities Project launched the SCHEP Photo Archive in June 2020. This was a pilot project to archive the project’s born-digital images, providing bilingual image titles, descriptions, and keyword search terms to enable both Arabic and English speakers to fully benefit from this resource. The more than 5,000 photos in the USAID SCHEP collection will be available to browse on the photo archive platform from March 2021.

Next steps

These accomplishments are not the end of ACOR’s photo archive projects. Next up: the ACOR Digital Archive Project, made possible with another American Overseas Research Center Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education. This new grant-funded work will make available 18,000 digital objects, including audio and video recordings, documents related to archaeological projects, and more, from both new and existing collections. The new project also incorporates an educator fellowship program to help activate these archival materials, whereby faculty from U.S. community colleges and minority-serving institutions will receive fellowship support to develop open-access lesson plans based on the archive. The new project will also put a special focus on enhancing Arabic language metadata.

For future updates on ACOR’s Digital Archive, join our mailing list. You can also browse select highlights from the collections at instagram.com/acorjordan/.

We would like to thank all those who participated in the ACOR Photo Archive Project and to recognize the numerous library patrons and academics who answered our many questions with patience and generosity.

*The phrase quoted in the title of this article is from a report by project external evaluator Aaron Rubinstein, 28 September 2020.

بناء القدرات

على الرغم من أن مدة المشروع محدودة إلا أن الهدف الذي يسعى المشروع  منذ البداية لتنفيذه  هو تحقيق أثر دائم يغيّر المنهجية التي يتبعها الأردن في حفظ وحماية إرثه الثقافي الغني والترويج له، ومن أجل ذلك شكّل المشروع – ومنذ بدايته- شراكات مع الأشخاص والمشاريع والجامعات والهيئات الحكومية العاملة في هذا المجال تجنباً لبدء العمل من نقطة الصفر. وبعد تقييم الاحتياجات وتقييم المشاريع السابقة والتواصل مع المعنيين وأصحاب المصلحة، استطاع المشروع تحديد الجوانب التي تحتاج إلى تعزيز وبناء قدرات وتنمية مهارات هذه الجهات التي يعمل معها. فبدأ المشروع عمله في بناء القدرات من خلال مجموعة متنوعة من الدورات التدريبية والمؤتمرات والجلسات الحوارية لرسم السياسات. فقد صمم المشروع جميع برامجه حسب  احتياجات الجهات التي يعمل معها، حيث عمل على تنمية المهارات ذات الفائدة بالفعل والتي يحتاجها العاملون لتطوير مستوى أدائهم وعملهم، ولمساعدة الشركاء والعاملين في قطاع الإرث الثقافي على تحقيق الاكتفاء الذاتي وعلى اكتساب المعرفة والخبرة اللازمتين للمضي قدماً بعد انتهاء المشروع

عمل المشروع على تصميم نموذج إدارة مستدام للإرث الثقافي في المواقع التي ينفّذ برامجه فيها، حيث ركّز جهوده على بناء قدرات الأفراد والمجتمعات خاصة التي تعيش في محيط المواقع الأثرية وزودهم بالأدوات التي تلزمهم للاعتماد على أنفسهم في رعاية مواردهم  بشكل مستقل دون الحاجة للمبادرات الحكومية أو الأجنبية. تمكن المشروع من تصميم مجموعة متنوعة من الدورات التدريبية لأبناء المجتمعات المحلية والتي صممت كل واحدة منها بشكل يراعي خصوصية كل موقع، مما ساعد على صقل مهاراتهم الفنية ومعارفهم وفهمهم لتاريخ وأهمية كل موقع ورفع وعيهم وتقديرهم لتراثهم

تصوير: عبد الفتاح غريب، زيد كاشور، يوسف أحمد، صوفيا سميث

الفعاليات

دعم وشارك مشروع استدامة الإرث الثقافي بمشاركة المجتمعات المحلية وبتنفيذ من قبل المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث في العديد من المناسبات الخاصة والاجتماعات رفيعة المستوى والمحاضرات والمؤتمرات منذ عام 2014 إلى 2018. وقد وفرت مثل هذه الفعاليات فرصًا لتبادل المعرفة وتطوير وتقديم السياسات والمبادئ التوجيهية، وتخطيط التعاون، وتقوية مجتمع ممارس في حماية الإرث الأثري الأردني

تصوير: صوفيا سميث، عبد الفتاح غريب، فريق الجمعية الملكية لحماية البيئة البحرية، يوسف أحمد، باربرا أ.بورتير 

التوعية

إن المجتمعات المضيفة هي التي تحدد نجاح أو فشل المشروع؛ لذا فإن بناء علاقات معها يعتبر واحداً من أهم أهداف مشروع استدامة الإرث الثقافي بمساعدة المجتمعات المحلية، وعليه فإن المشروع يلتزم أولاً بإحضار المعنيين وأصحاب المصلحة وتشجيع جميع مدراء المشاريع على الانخراط مع وجهاء المجتمع المحلي وشرح أهداف المشروع ونهجه في العمل بشكل واضح. وما أن تتشكل هذه العلاقات، يبدأ المشروع بحملات التوعية لدى بقية المجتمع، مع التركيز على الشباب والأسر، حيث أن توعيتهم بقيمة تلك المواقع التاريخية والفوائد الاقتصادية التي يمكن أن توفرها للمجتمع وتجعل منهم شركاء فاعلين

يتبع المشروع نهج شرح السلوكيات في التعامل مع الموقع بدلا من منعها، والتركيز على التعلم وليس على تأديب السلوكيات بل إنه يسعى إلى تعزيز حس الفخر بالموقع الأثري وتقوية روابط المجتمع به من خلال تنظيم ودعم زيارات إلى المواقع، مما يساعد في تحقيق الكثير من القيم التي يعمل المشروع على تطويرها. فمن أهم ما سعى إليه المشروع ضمن برامج التوعية هو أن يشعر الطالب بأنه جزء من الموقع وذلك من خلال زيادة انخراطه ببعض الأنشطة التفاعلية مثل تعلم كتابة النقوش الثمودية وصناعة الفسيفساء ترميم الفخار. 

نؤمن بأنه عندما يتحقق مستوى الوعي المطلوب تصبح المجتمعات المحلية مكوّناً أساسياً ضمن فريق العاملين بالمشروع، فمثل هذه الأنشطة تساعد في حماية المواقع من أعمال التخريب ويصبح أفرادها قادرون على مشاركة قصة وتاريخ الموقع التي تجذب المزيد من الزوار

تصوير: إيمان عبد السلام، عبد الفتاح غريب، فريق جمعية أصدقاء الآثار والتراث الأردنية، يوسف أحمد، صوفيا سميث، نايف الشملات، فريق الجمعية الملكية لحماية البيئة البحرية، مصطفى العجلوني