Excavations at Tall Jawa, Jordan ― The Early Islamic House

The fourth of five volumes of reports from excavations carried out in 1989 and 1991-5, this work presents 16 chapters on a house believed to span the transition period from the Byzantine to Islamic era in what is now Jordan. Excavation director Daviau (Wilfred Laurier U., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) contributes chapters on the site, setting, research methodology, stratigraphy, architectural features, typology of the pottery finds, and chronological implications of the settlement. Other chapter topics include five chapters on the artefacts, which include ceramic and inscribed lamps, glass vessels and lamps, and an early Islamic coin hoard. The volume is well illustrated with b&w drawings and photos and concludes with a DVD that contains lists of loci, databases and additional illustrations of the artefacts and site. This is a superb resource for an unusually complete survival from the early Umayyad era. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

P. M. Michele Daviau, Ph. D. (1990) in Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto, is professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is director of the Wadi ath-Thamad Project (northern Moab) and has published extensively on the archaeology of Jordan, especially the Excavations at Tall Jawa, Volume 1 (Brill 2003), Volume 2 (Brill 2002), and is an editor of Crossing Jordan (Equinox 2007).