Archaeology of Oil

I was pretty excited to read a recent piece in Levant by Shatha Mubaideen, David Petts, John B. Winterburn, Ali al-Manaser & Tobias Richter and titled “Colonial-industrial heritage in Jordan: the case of the As-Safawi H5 pumping station.” 

I have to admit that I don’t read Levant very regularly but I mostly know it as a journal that focuses on the Ancient and, in a pinch, Medieval periods in the eastern Mediterranean. This article is not that. Instead, it focuses on a British Mandate oil pipeline pumping station Jordan at the site of H5 station near the modern village of As-Safawi in the Harrat Ash-Sham Black desert.

The pumping station was one of a series of similar stations along the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline constructed by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) between 1932 and 1934. This pipeline remained in use until 1948. The pump station was more than just the tanks and equipment necessary to allow the pipeline to function. In fact, the article deals relatively little with that element of the site. Primary to the article was the various buildings built to house engineers, supervisors, and other workers on the pipeline. The site was connected to larger settlements in Jordan and in the larger British Mandate Levant by an airfield (for airmail) and road needed to build and maintain both the station and the pipeline. A pipeline brought water from the Azraq oasis 50 miles to the south.

Mubaideen et al. go on to demonstrate how the H5 pump station is consistent with not only the investment in infrastructure characteristic of the British Mandate Levant (particularly, their growing interest in securing access to petroleum), but also reflects British interests in social, economic, and military control. The organization of the space in the H5 pump compound paralleled the social organization of the operation with senior officials having more spacious and luxurious accommodations, engineers having middle grade accommodations, and various workers necessary for the functioning of the pump-station and pipeline being given more modest rooms in what appear to be dormitories. The Bedouin would camp outside the walls of the compound and serve as security in keeping with the British Mandate’s practice of employing Bedouin as “desert police” who both projected government control into inhospitable terrain and protected Mandate infrastructure. In effect, the remoteness of the pump station made it a man-camp.    

One of the most interesting aspects of the site is that it had a lengthy afterlife as a military base and a research facility. Its location along transportation routes and the presence of an airfield (and water) contributed to the development of a village in the shadow of the pump station-cum-military base. This settlement ebbed and flow with the stability of the region; when the Iraqi border was open in the 1990s, it grew, when the various Gulf Wars closed the border, the settlement contracted.

This project recognized that the experience of the community living beside the pump station was crucial to understanding how this site functioned has modern heritage. Community members recalled inexpensive movie nights at the compound, for example, and the classroom at the camp in the 1970s. The town logo of As-Safawi features an Arab Legion police outpost constructed in conjunction with the pump station. 

This kind of article is more than significant for a journal like Levant. It speaks to the growing awareness that the archaeology of oil is crucial lens through which to study the modern world and the Levant and Near East in particular. This means documenting