Concealment, Raiding, and Ambush

This chapter looks at the Tooth Hill campsites, which were a grail of modern conflict archaeology, as they preserved the faintest traces of military activity in a vast and hostile desert, and others probably lay undiscovered in-between Tel Shahm and Mudawwara. They are the rare imprint of the origins of modern mobile guerrilla warfare which shaped so many military actions across the twentieth century, and into the present. However, guerrilla warfare against the Hejaz Railway achieved arguably its most spectacular success not against a station but in what would later be regarded as a classic ambush. The Hallat Ammar ambush was about metal—trains, track, mines, and munitions—and so metal-detector survey was invaluable. No identifiable trace of the looting of the train was found, though the large quantity of railway debris had doubtless been sifted, robbed, and moved around in the intervening years. Indeed, despite its isolation, the archaeology of the ambush site could not be the pristine remains of the Arab Revolt, but rather, as elsewhere, a layering of the intervening century’s activities, disturbing, overlaying, and obscuring some of the events of the attack.