“…Settlement expansion was especially pronounced in southern Syria‐Palestine, especially in the present‐day Jordanian steppe. One may note that the broader trend of development of the semi‐arid desert fringes of the Levant also appears in Byzantine and Umayyad investment in the so‐called Desert Castles—elite residences which had agricultural appurtenances—and in large villages like al‐Andarin, Syria, where a sixth‐century Byzantine bath house, a feature more commonly associated with urban amenities, lived cheek‐by‐jowl with an Umayyad‐era bathhouse, possibly after the Byzantine building had gone out of use (Genequand, ; Mango, , ). The continued investment and agricultural development and apparent fertility of the desert margins throughout the Umayyad period (which ended in 750) and perhaps later indicates that farming continued there, despite environmental conditions which required the use of groundwater and rainwater capture for irrigation (Braemer et al, ; Genequand, , ; Oleson et al, ).…”