| Summary/Abstract |
The history of Jordan is an epistemological construction of the colonial past with Biblical archaeology at its core. At the same time, vernacular heritage is addressed by many foreign scholars as decaying, disappearing and accidental. This article takes issue with the foreign Biblical formation of the past and introduces local heritage-making as part of a decolonising construction. We debate the historical continuity of Biblical epistemology whilst proclaiming vernacular heritage as an accidental reality that is irrelevant to the ancient past. Local communities are introduced as active knowledge agents whose understanding of, and approach to, vernacular heritage can shift the epistemological debate on Jordan’s history and its relevance to the present and the future. This argument is anchored in case studies of the Biblical archaeology of Hisban and the local village of Gharisa, to investigate how each one functions in the absence/presence of the other. The comparison shows that while the Biblical epistemology applied in the case of Hisban precipitated a version of Jordan's history based on a spatio-political pattern of tribalism, local knowledge advanced a logic of modern history that included vernacular heritage as a link between the ancient past and the uncertain present and future in Jordan, and using Arabism, as opposed to tribalism, as a unifying framework.
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