Despite decades of excavation in and around Petra, archaeologists continue to grapple with the issues of chronological development and the organization of the city as a center of political and economic importance. Contributing to the incomplete nature of our understanding of Petra is the fact that significant pieces of the puzzle have managed to elude archaeological investigation. One of these is a large, open area located in the center of the city, south of and overlooking the colonnaded street, amidst the temples and other civic structures at the heart of Petra’s city center (fig. 1). Its central location, monumental scale and labor-intensive construction—cut deep into the side of a rocky slope (fig. 2) and perched on a large earthen platform six meters above the level of the shop-lined street—suggest that this area was part of the ceremonial, economic and political center of the city (see map), and therefore must have had an important role in the organization and life of Petra.

The creation of the ‘Lower Market’ was an extremely labor-intensive project. First, a large shelf (65 x 32) was quarried into the rocky slope south of Wadi Musa east of the Great Temple, leaving vertical escarpments, 16 m high, on the south and east (fig. 3, at bottom). The shelf was then extended northward by filling in the space between the quarry and a retaining wall, 53 m to the north, forming a large earthen terrace (65 x 53 m) (fig. 3, center). At the center of the earthen terrace is a 2 m stretch of wall--the only architectural feature visible on the large, flat earthen terrace -- protruding from underneath the northwest corner of a raised field that occupies the southeast quadrant of the earthen terrace. This field is known to have been cultivated by the Bedoul (the local bedouin tribe and long-time inhabitants of Petra) into the modern era.

A monumental wall, 2.5 m high, runs east-west along the juncture between the quarry and the earthen terrace, bisecting the site (the pale line across the middle of fig. 3). The quarried area to the south of the wall—which is bounded to the south and east by vertical escarpments, and to the west by the Great Temple’s perimeter wall—is filled with a deep deposit of earth, forming a plateau 2.5 m above the level of the earthen terrace. At the center of the plateau, the ruins of a rectangular structure are clearly visible at the surface (see site plan).

The initial identification of the site as a marketplace—along with the adjacent ‘Middle Market’ and  ‘Upper Market’—was made by the German expedition of Bachman, Wiegand and Watzinger, who completed the first extensive mapping of Petra’s city center (1921). Since no excavations were conducted at the time, however, these identifications were based primarily on their most prominent shared characteristic—large, open, unbuilt areas—and the expectation that a major entrepôt such as Petra would have a large centralized marketplace.

The raison d’etre of Petra was its role as a caravan city located on the axis of a network of ancient trade routes (fig. 4), particularly those devoted to the trade in frankincense and myrrh, linking Arabia with the Mediterranean and much of the ancient world (cf. Miller 1969; Van Beek 1969; Groom 1981). Despite its international economic importance during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, little is known about the organization of Petra’s economy—its trade and commerce. It was hoped that systematic study of a marketplace within Petra would provide valuable information about the city’s economic activities.

During a two-month field season in the summer of 1998, a survey and excavation was conducted in the so-called “Lower Market” in order to determine its function, organization, historical development, and its relationship to the other monuments in the city's civic center. Work began with the creation of an accurate map of the topography by the project’s surveyor, Paul Zimmerman, using the SiteMap surveying system, the computerized mapping system utilized by the Great Temple project (figs. 5 and 6). Relevant surface features and architectural components revealed through subsequent excavations were surveyed in and added to the overall site plan.