Roman military camps found in the deserts of Jordan

"These camps are a spectacular new find and an important new insight into Roman campaigning in Arabia. Roman forts and fortresses show how Rome held a province, but temporary camps reveal how they acquired it in the first place," said  Dr. Mike Bishop, an expert on the Roman military, according to Oxford University.

The army would have established the camps as temporary fortified stations while going on campaign.

"The level of preservation of the camps is really remarkable, particularly as they may have only been used for a matter of days or weeks…They went along a peripheral caravan route linking Bayir and Dûmat al-Jandal. This suggests a strategy to bypass the more used route down the Wadi Sirhan, adding an element of surprise to the attack. It is amazing that we can see this moment in time played out at a landscape scale," Dr. Fradley adds.

Cavalry troops traversed desolate territory

Since the distance between each camp is 23 to 27 miles (37 to 44 km), the team hypothesizes that it was too far for soldiers to walk in a day and that it was constructed by a cavalry troop that could traverse such desolate territory, perhaps on camels.

There is also a hypothesis, based on the distance between the camps, that another camp may have been situated farther west at the later Umayyad fort and well station at Bayir.

The recently found camps go directly into Dûmat al-Jandal, which is currently in Saudi Arabia but was once a town in the eastern part of the Nabataean Kingdom. It implies that Rome had to impose its rule, in contrast to the Roman history that has survived, contending that the change of control occurred peacefully at the end of the last Nabataean king's reign.

The camps were located by the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project (APAAME) and later photographed by the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project (EAMENA).

The study was published in Antiquity.

Study abstract:

Remote sensing survey in southern Jordan has identified at least three Roman temporary camps that indicate a probable undocumented military campaign into what is today Saudi Arabia, and which we conjecture is linked to the Roman annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106.