David Leslie Kennedy

David Leslie Kennedy
University of Western Australia | UWA · Department of Classics and Ancient History

BA (Hons) (Manchester); DPhil (Oxford)

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65
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Publications

Publications (65)
Article
Full-text available
A comprehensive remote sensing survey of AlUla County in north‐west Saudi Arabia has revealed 32 examples of the ancient, stone‐built animal traps known as ‘kites’. Noting that most (27) are located on the Ḥarrat ʿUwayriḍ, a satellite survey of parts of that lavafield outside of AlUla County was undertaken, identifying a further 175 kites. These sh...
Chapter
The First World War gave an enormous impetus to reconnaissance, photography, and air‐photo interpretation which was carried over into peacetime by archaeologists who had seen its potential. Aerial reconnaissance and photography were swiftly applied in the Near Eastern theatres, from Gallipoli to Persia. The scale of aerial photography during the Fi...
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The availability of high-resolution satellite imagery of Saudi Arabia on publicly available platforms such as Google Earth and Bing Maps has been transformational for archaeology. Within just a few years tens of thousands of sites previously unrecorded and scarcely known to the academic world have been mapped. Especially rich in sites are the succe...
Chapter
The justice and public safety community is made up of people who have dedicated their lives to keeping our neighborhoods safe, to protecting our families, and to safeguarding our freedoms. It is a challenging time for the U.S. criminal justice and public safety community. Prisons are overcrowded, recidivism rates are high, court systems are congest...
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Between Biblical ‘Ammon’ and Early Umayyad ‘Amman’ lie a thousand years of Graeco-Roman Philadelphia. During this period the population of the classical city and its hinterland reached a peak not seen again until the 20th century. During the Middle Ages, however, the population shrank dramatically, the city was abandoned, an island of crumbling gra...
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One of the most popular writers for travellers to Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria in the later nineteenth century was William Cowper Prime. His journey of 1855–1856 resulted in two books which went through multiple editions over a period of twenty years, a stimulus to follow in his footsteps and a standard text in the hands of many pious Christians....
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It has become increasingly common in archaeology to utilise virtual globes for regions where few if any aerial photographs are available. Saudi Arabia is one such and it has proved especially useful for identifying and mapping the prolific structures commonly referred to as the 'Works of the Old Men', most prominently kites. These are now generally...
Article
In this paper we generate chronological constraints through optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating on extensive prehistoric stone structures that stretch out in the Arabian Desert and appear as geometric lines, known as the “Works of the Old Men”. Two major types of the “Works” that are common throughout the Arabian Desert are the “wheels”...
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The traces of dispersed houses in desert or steppic regions of northern Jordan and southern Syria have been augmented by recent discoveries and fieldwork. The evidence suggests that they are dated to the Umayyad period, although often with traces of Late Roman/Jafnid (Ghassanid) origins. The new discoveries allow an enrichment of our knowledge for...
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Hundreds of thousands of aerial photographs of Middle Eastern countries have been taken since the beginning of the First World War. The majority has been destroyed, but tens of thousands survive in archives in several countries. Identification of and research on these collections has grown rapidly in recent years. Although the potential value of th...
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The stone structures known as kites and found widely in ‘Arabia’, are one of the more intriguing archaeological traces in what are often arid and bleak landscapes. They were first reported from the air in 1927, and by 1995 — largely through interpretation of old aerial photographs — c.500 had been identified. Now (2012), remote‐sensing techniques o...
Article
Aerial photography is so fundamental an instrument of modern archaeology that we often take it for granted. But its methods are surprisingly specific and its most important experimental theatre was probably the territory of the Levant - and especially the rocky terrain of Jordan. The author, a prominent aerial archaeologist of our own day, takes ti...
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Popular article on surveying the Jarash Hinterland, Jordan
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In the 1920s pilots overflying the Transjordan panhandle discovered thousands of enigmatic stone-built structures which the beduin called ‘’The Works of the Old Men’. We now know these works are several thousand years old, extend from Syria to Yemen and probably number a million or more, making them far older and significantly more extensive than P...
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Britain and the Middle East were the two areas in which the technique of aerial archaeology was pioneered in the 1920s. Overwhelmingly the latter took place in Syria where a French Jesuit priest, Antoine Poidebard, worked for a generation. Further south in Transjordan — as it then was — three men presided over a brief (1927–1929) but fruitful perio...
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Archaeologically, Saudi Arabia is one of the least explored parts of the Middle East. Now, thanks to Google Earth satellite imagery, a number of high-resolution ‘windows’ have been opened onto the landscape. Initial investigations already suggest large parts of the country are immensely rich in archaeological remains and most of those identified ar...
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A significant grant from the Packard Humanities Institute has allowed the development of a long-standing project of Aerial Archaeology in Jordan. In 2008 the number of flying hours, sites recorded and associated ground-work time trebled. Hundreds of sites, not previously recorded, have been added to the database. A web-based archive of the entire c...
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The ruins of ancient Gerasa are a stunning evocation of the splendour of the Graeco-Roman world. Yet only half the area within the ancient walls of the city is actively preserved as an Archaeological Park and very little of the extra-mural remains has been recorded much less explored. The latter is now under intense threat as the modern town grows...
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Aerial archaeology plays a crucial role in Western Europe in finding, recording, monitoring and presenting cultural heritage. In the Middle East, however, although it was pioneered almost a century ago, it has subsequently played a slight role in cultural heritage management. Since 1997 there has again been aerial reconnaissance for archaeology in...
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The authors have provided some of Antiquity's most stunning frontispieces since we introduced them in 2006. We asked them to show how aerial archaeology has developed in Jordan over some 90 years, tell us about the techniques and approaches used and its potential here and in other desert and mountainous lands.
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Pres de Petra la forteresse nabateenne d’Udrhuh devient en 106 un castrum romain. Description des vestiges (enceinte, principia). Decouverte en 2005 d’une inscription en latin, dedicace aux tetrarques par la legion VI Ferrata, avec martelage du nom de Maximien, donc datee entre 293 et 305. Mention d’une reconstruction du camp. Recherches sur les ca...
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“In the end, demography without numbers is waffle” (Coleman and Schofield 1986, 4) “... most population figures recorded in Greek and Roman literature have been scrutinized so often that any interpretation that has not yet met with common approval will probably remain forever controversial.” (Scheidel 1996, 165) “Historical knowledge of past human...
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In modern times the town of Zarqa has been a stopping place on the Pilgrim Road and a halting place on the Hijaz Railway. Today, swollen by refugees and Jordan's rising population, it has spread rapidly. At the heart of old Zarqa is the medieval khan (Qala'at Zarqa) but not far off is another site, apparently Roman and once perhaps more important t...
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AlcockS. E. (ed.): The Early Roman Empire in the East. (Oxbow Monograph 95.) Pp. viii + 212. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997. Paper, £24. ISBN: 1-900188-52-X. - Volume 51 Issue 2 - David Kennedy
Article
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Recent availability of declassified satellite images of landscapes and ancient cities in Turkey offer new and valuable material for archaeological research. Here David Kennedy explains the significance and use of some images in the Euphrates Valley.
Article
Re-examination of known Roman roads and milestones, and of new evidence for both in north-east Jordan, has considerably improved on a survey of the same area published in 1982. The present study brings together published accounts from the intervening years, presents new data from fieldwork and air photographic analysis, and offers some suggestions...
Article
The survey area extends from just west of Sabha to Dair al-Qinn in the east; and from the Syrian frontier south to the Baghdad Highway. Following a preliminary season in 1985, a season of fieldwork in 1992 extended the field survey over a wider area around the expedition base in Umm al-Quttain, experimented with the use of air photos of the region,...
Article
In an arid land water is vital. Mere rainfall is the only source of water, humans long ago found methods of collecting and concentrating it to supply their own needs and those of their stock and crops. Jordan is a region in which the methods used can be seen widely, not least in the fertile but ill-watered regions of the Southern Hauran along the b...
Article
The Azraq Oasis lies in the north-east desert of Jordan, some 85 km south-east of Amman. The oasis comprises a series of mudflats, pools and marshes, usually fed by groundwater, which offer some of the few permanent, natural water supplies in a region characterized by extreme heat and aridity. An archaeological and geomorphic survey has revealed th...

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