AlanLichty
Moderator
Wandering the various trails around Petra offers up a lot of little scenes that can be a photographer's delight. Here are a couple that caught my eye.
After Petra had been abandoned as an urban center (roughly 600 A.D.) the tomb facades were seen by goat herders as rather conveniently shaped caves that could be used for storage as well as shelter from the summer heat (100+F is quite common in summers). In this case whatever the reuse was is itself also long forgotten.
All of the heavily banded sandstone in Petra has another facet - what happens when you use it for masonry projects. We saw lots of it in the buildings we were excavating but it was covered up with plaster. Nabataeans were experts at making plaster molds that would allow them to replicate the appearance of the ornate sculpted marble columns in Greek and Roman period buildings in this era and then encase the sandstone structure with a shell that made it look much more expensive and hid the distractions of colorfully striped stone.
Not so for masonry projects related to their extensive water retention projects. This was a small dam built along one of the unnamed drainages that was fun to stumble across.
C&C always welcome.
After Petra had been abandoned as an urban center (roughly 600 A.D.) the tomb facades were seen by goat herders as rather conveniently shaped caves that could be used for storage as well as shelter from the summer heat (100+F is quite common in summers). In this case whatever the reuse was is itself also long forgotten.
All of the heavily banded sandstone in Petra has another facet - what happens when you use it for masonry projects. We saw lots of it in the buildings we were excavating but it was covered up with plaster. Nabataeans were experts at making plaster molds that would allow them to replicate the appearance of the ornate sculpted marble columns in Greek and Roman period buildings in this era and then encase the sandstone structure with a shell that made it look much more expensive and hid the distractions of colorfully striped stone.
Not so for masonry projects related to their extensive water retention projects. This was a small dam built along one of the unnamed drainages that was fun to stumble across.
C&C always welcome.
