Developing Petra: UNESCO, the World Bank, and America in the desert

Abstract

This article charts the nascent development agendas for archaeological heritage and tourism at Petra in Jordan. We begin with the early internationalism of UNESCO and its participation programme for Petra followed by the restructuring of American foreign policy interests to embed heritage tourism within USAID projects. A technocratic tourismas-assistance model galvanised USAID and the World Bank's interest in Petra, as it did the CIA, the American Schools of Oriental Research, the US National Park Service, and Jordan's Department of Antiquities. Thus, we reveal how saving Petra was underwritten by an increasing American vigilance in the Middle East. Unlike the educational and humanitarian components of the United Nations programme, the USAID and World Bank initiatives at Petra were almost exclusively directed toward tourism development, generating hard-currency revenue, monetising the Nabataean ruins, and sowing the seeds of predatory capitalism. Our longitudinal study reveals that what has been sustained at Petra is not the preservation of heritage, nor support for local communities, but rather an overburden of international bureaucracy and consultancy culture. KEYWORDSArchaeology; heritage tourism; security; Jordan; USA Situated between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea and inhabited since prehistoric times, Petra is best known internationally as the rock-cut capital city of the Nabateans. Petra was both constructed and carved into the red sandstone rock, set amidst mountains riddled with passages and gorges. An ingenious water management system allowed extensive human settlement of an essentially arid area during the Nabataean, Roman, and Byzantine periods. UNESCO considers it to be one of the world's richest and largest archaeological sites and listed Petra as World Heritage in 1985. But it also has a remarkable twentieth-century history similarly tied to shifting empires and occupation, trade, and economics, and was subject to the forces of nationalism and internationalism that we trace here. Developing Petra brought together strands of government, military, corporate, and archaeological interest in a kind of adventurism that was, in many ways, an extension of the colonial enterprise. Scholars have recently described how colonial legacies (Ottoman era and interwar) and post-WWII neoliberal agendas have inflected UNESCO, the World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in shaping Jordan's approach to archaeology and museums (Corbett 2015, Abu-Khafajah andMiqdadi 2019). Here we explore the historiography of assistance, from UNESCO's projects to the American hegemony of USAID, IMF and the World Bank programmes.