Digging Up Pella

The Pella Project began on a blustery winter’s day in February 1977, when members of J. Basil Hennessy’s Teleilat Ghassul team visited Pella for the first time, to walk the site, pick up sherds, and generally ‘get the lie of the land’ they contemplated to explore. More specifically, they were in search of a multi- period site, which would better match the wide range of interests building at Sydney University. Hennessy and his lecturing partner Tony McNicoll came in search of a site that would span the known historical canvas in Jordan, from the depths of prehistory to the recent Islamic past, as they had the ambition to teach such an historical vista to a new generation of Sydney archaeology students. Pella lived up to their initial expectations, with an occupation ranging from deep prehistory to the modern era. With the enthusiastic support of partners at Wooster College Ohio and the Department of Antiquities, work started at Pella in 1979.

After more than 45 years of excavation and research, Pella has produced a seemingly unending cornucopia of archaeological riches, with few occupational gaps in a greater than 8000 year long sequence, and much evidence for a flourishing urban life from its beginnings around 3000 BCE, through Egyptian imperium and local independence, rule by the Greco-Macedonians, Romans and Christian Byzantines, through to its final chapters in the Islamic periods, ending around 1500 CE.

In what must be a targeted presentation, we shall focus on the first age of prosperity, the time of the great Bronze Age cities of the Fourth through Second Millennia BCE. This last lecture in NEAF’s Sydney/Jordan 50th anniversary celebratory series will be delivered by Dr. Stephen Bourke, current Director of the Pella Excavations.