Understanding Heritage Loss and Landscape Change in the Jordan Valley through Legacy Aerial Photography

Last year I was awarded a John Fell Fund research grant for a project called Understanding heritage loss and landscape change in the Jordan Valley through legacy aerial photography. This funding is supporting the continued digitisation of a large collection of aerial photographs taken by the Royal Air Force (RAF) on the Palestine Front in 1918 now held at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra. These photographs can then be used to identify archaeological features and understand how these have been impacted by development and change across this region over the past century, alongside the broader degradation of the natural environment.

The collection of First World War photographs of this region held at the AWM is possibly the largest single surviving collection covering Palestine in this period, numbering over 2,000 prints. While large numbers of aerial photographs were taken in the Middle East by British-led forces during this conflict, as well as by German aircrews in support of the opposing Ottoman military, only a relatively small number have survived in British or German collections. In the UK a large collection of negatives from all the fronts where the British airmen operated during the First World War were stored at RAF Farnborough as part of the School of Photography, but were already found to have severely deteriorated in the 1920s and largely destroyed, with a small surviving portion moved to the Imperial War Museum. 

Figure 1. A distribution of aerial photograph centre points digitised so far from the AWM collection.

Members of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) from 1 Squadron RAAF (then operating as the Australian Flying Corps) also flew on the Palestine Front, although they were listed as 67 (Australian) Squadron under overall British command. While there are photographs from this squadron in the collection, the majority were taken by 14 Squadron and 142 Squadron RAF. It is not clear why a large stock of prints was taken back to Australia following the end of the First World War, although it is fortunate that they were given the fate of the material that was taken back to the UK. Much of the collection investigated so far are near-vertical aerial photographs and were likely used to help construct and update mapping of the Palestine Front as it rapidly moved during 1918 following the victory of British-led forces at the Third Battle of Gaza in November of 1917.

This current grant will cover the digitisation of 283 prints from the collection, building on the digitisation of a similar portion of the collection by the EAMENA project last year (Figure 1). These photographs cover the southern part of the Jordan Valley, taking in parts of modern Jordan and Palestine. This digitised imagery is already informing our understanding of how the landscape has been altered, for instance at the site of Kh. Dash-Sha just west of the River Jordan. The site consists of a rectangular courtyard structure and adjacent birka with a feeding water channel, with evidence of Roman/Byzantine and Early Islamic occupation. In a photograph taken by 142 Squadron RAF on the morning of 5 Augus1918 the site can be seen clearly, but in recent satellite imagery the site has been severely disturbed with much of the southern side of the site demolished (Figure 2). Taking in declassified U.S. Corona images from the 1960s where although the site itself is barely visible we can narrow down the most significant period of damage to the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in a period between 26 September 1967 and 20 August 1968 when a large military boundary and access road was built across the site by Israeli occupation forces.

Figure 2. The upper image is a detail of Kh. Dash-Sha from AWM image AWM2023.140.933 taken on 5 August 1918 where the site is visible under vegetation. The lower satellite image shows the site on 17 December 2019, with the primary military damage in 1967-8 visible (Source: AWM; CNES/Airbus via Google Earth).

The imagery is not only useful for understanding traditional archaeological landscapes but can also help understand the heritage of the very conflict the photographs were tasked with capturing. Many of the images cover areas with Ottoman trenches and other military positions that could be transferred to British military field maps. In most cases these military features have been demolished, often in the Jordan Valley by subsequent militarised activities relating to the later Arab Israeli conflict. But in some instances, we can identify fragments of Ottoman trench systems still survive as archaeo-topographical features.

This John Fell Fund project will run to May 2025 and will also involve further research on the RAF squadrons involved in The National Archives in Kew. The results of this work will be published in future research papers as part of the broader output of the EAMENA project. The digitised imagery will eventually be added and made accessible via the AWM online catalogue.