1. INTRODUCTION
The Western concept of time has long served the interests of colonial powers. Scholars term this ‘temporal colonisation’: the systematic use of time to exclude certain peoples and histories from official accounts of the past, present and future (Murrah-Mandril 2020). Mignolo’s (2011) foundational work demonstrates how Western ideas of linear time were imposed on non-European cultures, positioning European modernity as the pinnacle of civilization while relegating other societies to an archaic, pre-modern status. This temporal hierarchy turns geographical differences into chronological ones, establishing colonial distinctions based on alignment with Western temporal frameworks.
The legal framework governing Jordan’s archaeological heritage has evolved in distinct phases, moving from externally applied mandates to a comprehensive national system that asserts state control and defines cultural property. This journey reflects the growing institutional capacity of the Department of Antiquities, established in 1923. However, this institutionalisation of cultural heritage during the British Mandate also embedded colonial notions of time in laws that still shape heritage recognition today. Initially, the region was subject to the 1920 Antiquities Ordinance under the British Mandate for Palestine. The first independent Jordanian legislation, the Law of Antiquities No. 24 for the year 1934, was enacted under the Director Hashem Khair (Jordanian Department of Antiquities 1934). This was later updated as Law No. 33 for the year 1953: Law of Antiquities, Jordan (1953) during the tenure of the influential archaeologist G. Lankaster Harding. Following the 1967 war, a new law, Law No. 26 for year 1968: Law of Antiquities, Jordan (1968) was issued under the leadership of Dr Awni Dajani. The current legal framework was established by the Law of Antiquities No. 21 of 1988 (Jordanian Department of Antiquities 1988). It was subsequently amended by Law No. 23 for year 2004: Law amending the Law of Antiquities, Jordan (2004) to address contemporary requirements for heritage protection and management.
The 1988 law (as amended) is notable for codifying a specific temporal framework that continues to shape heritage recognition in Jordan. Article 2 of the law defines antiquities primarily as any object made or modified by humans ‘before the year AD 1750’. While the law allows the minister to designate later objects as antiquities by official decision, and protects pre-600 CE organic remains, this cut-off functions as what Joyce (2020) terms ‘monumental time’: a retrospective view that freezes selected pasts in fixed form, signalling transcendent value while rendering other histories invisible. It manifests what Mignolo (2011) describes as ‘colonial difference’ expressed in time, naturalising European periodisation. The 1750 threshold, complemented by Law No. 5 of 2005: Law Protection of Architectural and Urban Heritage (Jordan 2005), which covers later structures, effectively frames the preceding Ottoman presence (1516–1918) as a temporal gap, unless specifically exempted. This legal distinction, rooted in the Mandate-era institutionalisation of heritage, continues to influence what is protected and what is rendered historically invisible.
Nowhere are these dynamics more evident than in Jordan’s vernacular villages, Ottoman-era settlements abandoned between the late 1960s and early 1970s as residents migrated to nearby ‘new villages’ seeking infrastructure and opportunity. Yet this migration was never a clean break (i.e. incomplete exodus). Communities maintained farms, returned for celebrations, told stories and kept keys to houses that no longer sheltered them. The result is what this study terms ‘villages of two times’: the abandoned ancestral settlement, alive in memory and practice, and the new village, the tangible response to modernisation. Parallel challenges emerge in conflict-affected heritage contexts, where rehabilitation must navigate both physical destruction and disrupted temporal continuity (Amro & Ammar 2024). Together, they embody a temporal complexity that the 1750 cut-off cannot apprehend.
To theorise this complexity, the study draws on two complementary frameworks. Decolonial critique illuminates the 1750 cut-off as an instrument of exclusion. Giles Deleuze’s philosophy of time, which reconceives temporality as a dynamic multiplicity rather than a linear sequence (Deleuze 1968/1994, 1969/1990), provides conceptual tools for articulating the alternative temporalities that communities sustain. The study addresses three questions:
How did colonial temporal logic become embedded in Jordan’s heritage legislation?
What alternative temporalities do communities sustain through ongoing relationships with abandoned villages?
What might it mean to practice heritage otherwise, to recognise these villages as sites of living, multitemporal (as opposed to linear–temporal) connection?
The stakes extend beyond academic discourse: for these communities, the 1750 cut-off is a lived experience of exclusion. By tracing its colonial origins and amplifying the temporal understandings it excludes, the study aims to contribute to what is termed ‘temporal justice’: the recognition that heritage value accrues through memory, practice and intergenerational attachment, not merely chronological distance. This study makes three interconnected contributions. First, it traces the colonial genealogy of Jordan’s 1750 cut-off, demonstrating how British Mandate-era temporal frameworks persist in post-independence legislation as an unexamined instrument of temporal colonisation. Second, it advances a novel theoretical vocabulary for vernacular temporality—layering, absence, adaptation, differentiation and potential—grounded in empirical analysis of community practices and articulated through Deleuzian concepts of the virtual, the crystal–image and becoming. Third, it proposes ‘temporal justice’ as both a diagnostic framework for identifying colonial temporalities in heritage governance and a positive policy agenda cantered on cultural connection rather than chronological distance.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This study integrates three interconnected bodies of thought—decolonial critiques of time, critical heritage studies of temporality and Deleuze’s philosophy of multiplicity—to theorise how communities maintain relationships with abandoned sites that exceed linear chronological frameworks.
2.1 TEMPORAL COLONISATION AND DIFFERENTIAL TIME CONSCIOUSNESS
‘Temporal colonisation’ reveals time as an instrument of colonial control. Murrah-Mandril (2020) demonstrates how dominant temporal frameworks exclude marginalised peoples from official accounts of past, present and future, while identifying ‘differential time consciousness’ as a strategy through which resistant communities maintain alternative temporal frameworks. This concept illuminates how Jordanian villagers sustain relationships that the 1750 cut-off cannot recognise: the old village is simultaneously abandoned (in chronological time) and present (in experiential time). As one participant reported, ‘the old village is not gone’ (G2, 2024), a statement incomprehensible within linear chronology but coherent within differential time consciousness.
Mignolo’s (2011) analysis of the coloniality of power provides foundational grounding. Within the colonial matrix, time operates through the ‘translation of geography into chronology’, converting spatial differences between cultures into temporal differences between stages of development. For Jordan, this reveals how the 1750 cut-off values pre-1750 ‘antiquity’ for its connection to distant and foreign civilizations (Nabateans, Romans, Byzantines) while dismissing post-1750 vernacular heritage as insufficiently ‘historic’. The cut-off functions as a colonial difference expressed in time. As Al-Rabady & Abu-Khafajah (2023) demonstrate in their analysis of Jordan’s post-Ottoman heritage governance, the marginalisation of vernacular architecture reflects not only colonial periodisation but also post-independence state-building priorities that favoured monumental antiquities as symbols of national identity over everyday built heritage. Daher (2007) similarly critiques the ‘antiquity bias’ in Levantine heritage policy, arguing that Ottoman-era sites remain systematically under-protected because they do not fit narratives of deep civilizational continuity.
2.2 MONUMENTAL TIME, PRESENTISM AND HERITAGE AS PROCESS
Critical heritage studies examine how heritage institutions construct temporal frameworks. Harvey (2001) critiques arbitrary chronological boundaries, urging the examination of heritage as ‘a process or a human condition’ rather than a fixed category. This processual view resonates with how Jordanian communities maintain evolving relationships with abandoned villages through practices of return, storytelling and memory; practices that the 1750 cut-off cannot apprehend. This processual understanding of heritage stands in stark contrast to the fixed, retrospective logic that underpins official preservation frameworks. Bradley (2024) argues that monuments are understood through two opposing temporal perspectives: as structures ‘directed to a future that their builders could not control’ or, conversely, as ‘relics of a forgotten past’ that must be continually reinterpreted.
Jordan’s 1750 cut-off exemplifies this retrospective logic: pre-1750 sites are protected because they can be framed as distant and foundational, while recent vernacular heritage falls outside protection, a dynamic captured in participants’ frustration: ‘They tell us the village is not old enough’ (G1, 2024).
Scholars also identify ‘presentism’ in heritage practice: despite rhetorical commitments to future generations, policy remains predominantly present-focused (Holtorf & Högberg 2020). Both monumental time and presentism exclude authentic engagement with the future, precisely what the villages of two times embody through residents’ hopes that ‘maybe one day the old village will live again’ (B1, 2024). Moody (2015: 113) centres community in heritage-making, emphasising that heritage is:
a present-day process […] an actively constructed understanding, a discourse about the past that is ever in fluctuation.
This reveals that the stories communities tell about abandoned villages are not supplementary to heritage’s meaning, but constitutive of it. Makhzoumi’s (2009) work on vernacular landscapes in Lebanon and Syria offers a regional parallel: communities maintain living relationships with agricultural terraces and abandoned settlements that official heritage frameworks cannot recognise, precisely because these relationships are temporal (rooted in memory and practice) rather than chronological (measured by age).
2.3 TEMPORAL MULTIPLICITY
Deleuze’s philosophy challenges linear temporality and offers a vocabulary for understanding time as multiplicity, coexistence and becoming. In The Logic of Sense (1969/1990), he distinguishes two modes of time. Chronos is ordered, sequential time—the linear, measurable time of clocks and historical periods that makes the 1750 cut-off appear meaningful. Aion is the limitless time of past and future that escapes the present, a ‘self-renewing reservoir of time-production, constantly splitting into past and future’ (Trnka 2023: 141), a dimension where the past persists as virtual and is always available to be reactivated. Aion is the time in which, as participants report, the old village remains present despite physical abandonment.
In Difference and Repetition (1968/1994), Deleuze distinguishes the virtual from the actual. The virtual is not the opposite of the real but a dimension of it. As philosopher Constantin V. Boundas succinctly puts it, the virtual is a ‘differentiated and differentiating process whose differentiating dynamism coincides with its differentiated actualization’ (Boundas 2006: 297). It is the reservoir of potentialities that exceed any actualisation. The actual is the tangible expression of the virtual, but it never exhausts it. The virtual persists as that which can always be reactivated, reconfigured and recombined.
Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy provides additional resources. The time–image presents time directly, breaking linear causality to reveal memory as a force shaping present experience. The crystal–image displays the exchange between the virtual and the actual, revealing time as the simultaneous creation of the past and the present. When a participant describes stones that ‘hold all the times’ (G4, 2024), they envision their ancestral village as a crystal–image, a site where past and present coexist. This framework culminates in a view of heritage as becoming: an ongoing transformation through difference and repetition, where the past is repeated with difference, creating something new that carries its trace.
2.4 INTEGRATING THE FRAMEWORK
Decolonial critique demonstrates that the 1750 cut-off functions as a form of temporal colonisation. Critical heritage studies reveal how monumental time and presentism exclude community-centred heritage. Deleuze’s philosophy articulates the multiple temporalities that communities sustain: the coexistence of Chronos and Aion, the interplay of the virtual and the actual, the becoming of heritage through difference and repetition. From this integrated perspective, the 1750 cut-off appears not as a neutral administrative boundary but as a specific temporal ontology—one that privileges Chronos over Aion, the actual over the virtual, and stasis over becoming. The villages of two times embody an alternative ontology: the past persists as a virtual presence, multiple times coexist within a single stone, and heritage is continuously created through practices of return, memory and adaptation.
3. METHODS
Five villages (Samad, Deir al-Samadia, Gharisa, Al-Smakiya, Badhan) were purposively selected to capture the geographical and experiential diversity of Jordan’s ‘incomplete exodus’ phenomenon (Figure 1). Established between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all fall outside Jordan’s Antiquities Law and experienced migration to new settlements during the 1960s–70s. Selection criteria included: establishment during the late Ottoman or early Mandate period; documented ‘incomplete exodus’ migration; preservation of significant vernacular architecture; continuity of descendant communities in adjacent new villages; and geographical distribution across Jordan’s ecological regions.
Figure 1
Abandoned vernacular villages in Jordan showing the relationship between old settlements and adjacent new villages: (a) Al-Smakiya (Al-Smakiyeh); (b) Samad; and (c) Gharisa.
Note: Each abandoned ancestral village appears alongside the new village established during the migration of the 1960s–70s.
Sources: (a) Francesca Radcliffe. Copyright © Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME). Reproduced with permission. (b, c) Robert Bewley (Bewley 2007–16). Copyright © APAAME. Reproduced with permission.
3.1 SAMPLING STRATEGY
Initial participants were identified through municipal council records in each village and through consultation with local mukhtars (community heads). Snowball sampling proceeded from these initial contacts (four to six per village). Potential biases include the overrepresentation of more visible or articulate community members and the underrepresentation of residents with weaker ties to the old village. To mitigate these biases, participants were actively sought across different kinship networks and varied migration histories (early versus late leavers, those who returned seasonally versus those who did not). Saturation was reached at 42 interviews, with no new themes emerging in the final five interviews.
During the period 2023–24, data were collected through interviews, archival research and visual documentation. Semi-structured interviews (n = 42) were conducted with elderly villagers (aged 65–95) recruited via snowball sampling. Interviews explored memories of village life, migration experiences, current relationships with abandoned sites, intergenerational knowledge transmission and perceptions of heritage. All interviews were audio-recorded with informed consent, transcribed verbatim in Arabic and translated into English for analysis. Archival research examined Ottoman land codes, British Mandate records (1923–46), Jordanian heritage laws, municipal records and historical photographs. Visual documentation recorded architectural remains, spatial layouts, building techniques, and relationships between old and new settlements.
Analysis proceeded in three phases:
Phase 1: thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2006) coded transcripts in NVivo using both inductive codes emerging from participant narratives and deductive codes derived from the theoretical framework (temporal colonisation, virtual/actual, monumental time, etc.). Theme refinement followed an iterative process: initial coding produced 47 low-level codes, which were grouped into 12 mid-level categories, then synthesised into the five higher order dimensions (layering, absence, adaptation, differentiation, potential) through repeated comparison between data and theoretical constructs. Disconfirming cases (narratives that did not fit emerging themes) were examined and led to refinement of the ‘differentiation’ dimension to better capture critical perspectives on migration. Coding continued until theoretical saturation was reached.
Phase 2: critical discourse analysis examined how the 1750 cut-off constructs temporal hierarchies in legislation.
Phase 3: theoretical integration was carried out iteratively between narratives and Deleuze’s concepts.
As a Jordanian heritage scholar with cultural familiarity but outsider status relative to these specific communities, the author practiced reflexivity by privileging participants’ interpretive frameworks over theoretical commitments. This approach aligns with decolonial methodological principles articulated by Jordanian and regional scholars, including Abu-Khafajah’s (2014) call for ‘community-centered heritage research’ that centres local knowledge systems, and Maffi’s (2009) demonstration, in the Jordanian context, that ethnographic methods are essential for documenting intangible heritage that state frameworks systematically exclude.
4. JORDAN’S HERITAGE LEGISLATION: THE ‘CHRONOS’ DISCOURSE
The institutionalisation of archaeology in Jordan emerged from a contest between Ottoman sovereignty and European colonial ambition. While Ottoman authorities asserted control through the Imperial Museum (1869) and Antiquities laws (1874, 1884, 1906) that regulated foreign excavations (Çelik 2016), European-led institutions such as the British Palestine Exploration Fund (1865) progressively established a knowledge infrastructure operating outside Ottoman control. These organisations advanced European scholarly interests while marginalising local and Ottoman-era heritage, exemplifying what Jacobs (2010) terms ‘colonial nostalgia’, a selective remembrance favouring biblical and classical antiquities while rendering indigenous pasts invisible (Al-Rabady & Abu-Khafajah 2023).
This colonial dynamic crystallised in 1923 with the founding of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities as an extension of the British-controlled Department of Palestinian Antiquities. Under British archaeologist George Horsfield, the department imported a European approach emphasising classical civilizations, concentrating on Jerash, Petra and Amman’s citadel while ignoring Ottoman-era remains and vernacular architecture. The Antiquities Law of 1934, drafted under British oversight, classified antiquities as objects created before 1700 CE, later revised to 1750 CE (Jordanian Department of Antiquities 1934). This cut-off mirrored European historical periodisation, distinguishing ‘early modern’ from ‘modern’, conveniently excluding significant portions of the Ottoman period (1516–1918), which European archaeologists dismissed as a period of decline unworthy of preservation. As one British administrator wrote in 1929, ‘the country possesses little of architectural interest after the Crusader period’ (British Mandate Archives 1929).
The 1750 cut-off operationalises what Mignolo (2011) identifies as the translation of geographical difference into chronological hierarchy. Jordan was constructed as a repository of antiquities whose value derived from its connection to European civilization (Nabateans, Romans, Byzantines) rather than from its meaning for local communities. The post-1750 Ottoman period was dismissed as one of decay, thereby erasing evidence of recent Islamic history and integration into the Ottoman world and legitimising European claims to guardianship. This temporal hierarchy justified removing antiquities to European museums as ‘universal’ heritage, marginalised Ottoman-era heritage and established a legislative framework ensuring colonial temporal categories persisted after decolonisation.
The 1934 law was preserved through amendments, culminating in the Antiquities Law No. 21 of 1988, which is still in effect and defines antiquities as objects created before 1750 (Jordanian Department of Antiquities 1988). The law encodes a progressivist perspective, antiquities as ‘evidence of progress’, constructing pre-1750 Jordan as a site where civilization’s evolution can be traced, while post-1750 Jordan appears as a recipient of advancements elsewhere. Section (b) theoretically permits post-1750 protection but places the burden of proof on requestors, leaving decisions to ministerial discretion; it is rarely invoked. Another Law, the Urban Heritage Law No. 5 of 2005 (Jordan 2005), created a legislative bifurcation: pre-1750 sites are designated as ‘antiquities’ under robust legal protection, while post-1750 sites receive weaker ‘heritage’ protection. Vernacular villages fall through these legislative cracks.
This analysis reveals the 1750 cut-off as an instrument of temporal colonisation, systematically excluding vernacular villages from heritage protection by privileging chronological distance over living cultural connection. The following section examines five dimensions of temporal experience through which residents articulate their relationships with ancestral villages, which fundamentally challenge the cut-off’s linear logic.
5. LIVED TEMPORALITIES: THE ‘AION’ DISCOURSE
Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed five aspects of temporal experience extending beyond the 1750 cut-off’s linear timeline.
5.1 TEMPORAL LAYERING
The most common theme was temporal layering, which recurred across physical structures, spaces and memories. In Badhan, a participant described walking through the old village and reading its history via its stones:
You can see the different times in the stones. The oldest part, where my grandfather built, the stones are rough, unshaped—they [i.e. the villagers] took them from the mountain as they were. Then, where my father added a room, you see the stones are cut more carefully, squared. Then, where we built the new kitchen before we left, you see concrete blocks, iron windows. The village holds all of it. It’s not one time, it is many times, all still there.
(B1, 2024)
This illustrates what Lucas (2020) calls the ‘archaeology of time’: material remains that embody multiple temporalities, challenging linear historical narratives. Value is measured by temporal depth, the accumulation of family history in stone, rather than chronological distance from the present. In Gharisa, layering appears differently because the village is built on an archaeological site. A participant explained:
When we built, we used the old stones. There were ruins here already, maybe from the Romans or before. We took the stones and built with them. You can see them in the walls, the carved ones, different from our stones. So, the village has old times and newer times mixed. The Romans are in our walls.
(G4, 2024)
This creates a virtual–actual relationship: the ancient past persists virtually within the walls of the modern village. In Al-Samakiya, a participant described how seasonal practices generate temporal layering through repetition:
Every year at harvest, we go to the old village. Not to work—the fields are still there, but we don’t live there anymore. We go to remember. And when we go, it’s like all the harvests come back. I see my father there, my uncle, the way we used to work together. The time of harvest now and the time of harvest then become the same.
(K1, 2024)
In these varied forms (stone, reuse, ritual), temporal layering demonstrates that communities measure heritage value not by how old a place is, but by how many times it holds.
5.2 TEMPORAL ABSENCE
The second major theme was temporal absence: empty spaces haunted by virtual presences that persist despite physical emptiness. In Deir al-Samadia, a participant described walking through the abandoned village:
You feel them when you walk through. Not ghosts exactly, not like in stories. But presence. The women at the ovens, the children in the paths, the men sitting in the shade. They are still there, somehow. You don’t see them, but you feel them. The village is empty, but it is not empty.
(D2, 2024)
The 1750 cut-off, which focuses on material, fabric and age, has no category for this ‘absent’ presence. Participants did not see this as merely melancholic. A participant from Gharisa said:
The absence is part of us now. It reminds us of what we had, what we lost, and what we still carry. When I sit in my new house, I think of the old village. The empty rooms there are full of my memories. So, the absence is not empty, it is full.
(G4, 2024)
In Samad, a participant explained how absence opened space for new presence:
Since we left, the birds have come. The plants have grown. The village is not dead; it is alive in a different way. The stones are still there; the paths are still there. And the birds and plants are there, too. So, it is not empty; it is just empty of us. But we are still there in memory.
(S1, 2024)
Hence, communities experience an absence that is full, a presence that persists without material trace; the virtual made tangible in memory, in nature’s return, in the quiet continuity of belonging.
5.3 TEMPORAL ADAPTATION
The third theme was temporal adaptation, heritage practices and sites of their origins. In Samad, participants explained how the old village transformed into a site for a new tradition: family visits during Eid. A participant described:
We started bringing the children to the old village during Eid. At first, it was just to show them where we came from. But then it became something we did every year. Now it is a tradition. It was not a tradition before, but it is now. The village made it happen.
(S1, 2024)
This demonstrates heritage’s ‘future-making’ power (Harrison 2013; Alnusairat & Qadourah 2024). Eid visits are not about preserving an old tradition but establishing a new one, made possible by the old village’s ongoing significance. In Gharisa, participants described adaptive reuse of material fabric. A participant recounted:
We cleaned up the old guest house. It was falling; the roof was gone. But the walls were still strong. So, we fixed it, put a new roof, and made it nice again. Now we use it for meetings and sometimes for celebrations. It is alive again, but differently.
(G4, 2024)
As another participant stated:
Heritage is not what was. It is what continues. The old village continues, even if in a different way.
(GA2, 2024)
In these practices of renewed gathering and repaired space, temporal adaptation reveals that heritage lives not in fixed forms but in the capacity to generate new meanings.
5.4 TEMPORAL DIFFERENTIATION
The fourth theme was temporal differentiation: different generations perceived and interacted with the same village in unique ways. In Al-Samakiya, a participant reflected:
Every generation sees it differently. My grandfather saw his home—he was born there, lived there, and worked there. My father saw where he grew up—he left as a young man, but it was still his place. I see history—I was born in the new village, but my family comes from the old village. My children see something else: maybe heritage, maybe tourism, maybe just a place to play.
(K1, 2024)
This traces a progression from home to origin, to history, to something else, illustrating that heritage significance is not fixed but transforms across generations. In Badhan, participants expressed a more critical view, challenging the dominant narrative portraying migration as progress. One participant insisted:
They say we left for progress, for development. But progress for whom? We left because the old ways became impossible—no roads, no schools, no future for our children. That is not progress; that is displacement. The old village is not backward; it’s where we were. The new village is not better, it’s different.
(B1, 2024)
Temporal differentiation thus reveals that heritage significance is not a fixed property of sites but a relationship that shifts across generations.
5.5 TEMPORAL POTENTIAL
The fifth theme was temporal potential: the feeling that the old village, despite ruin, still offers future opportunities. In Badhan, participants demonstrated the strongest sense of future possibilities. One participant reflected:
Maybe one day the old village will come to life again. Not the same way, but something new. The children are interested now. They ask questions. They want to know who lived where, what happened. That is the beginning. If they care, maybe they will do something.
(B1, 2024)
Another participant imagined adaptive reuse:
Some people talk about fixing up the old houses, maybe to bring in tourists. There are beautiful views and interesting buildings. If we had some help—from the government, from an organisation—we could do something. The village could be useful again, not just empty.
(B1, 2024)
Temporal potential thus reveals that the old village is not a finished past but an open future, its virtual possibilities awaiting reactivation by generations yet to come.
5.6 DIFFERENTIAL TIME CONSCIOUSNESS
The findings collectively demonstrate what Murrah-Mandril (2020) describes as differential time consciousness, marginalised communities holding alternative views of time that challenge colonial temporal frameworks. Participants rejected official narratives: the 1750 cut-off labelling villages ‘too young’; the progress narrative viewing migration as leaving backwardness; the preservationist view freezing villages as timeless relics. Instead, they shared different values: measuring importance by family memory rather than age; seeing the past as ongoing rather than finished; viewing the future as open and possible rather than fixed. Table 1 synthesises these five temporal dimensions.
Table 1
Five dimensions of vernacular temporality in Jordan’s abandoned villages.
| TEMPORAL DIMENSION | CORE EXPERIENCE | KEY VILLAGE MANIFESTATIONS | REPRESENTATIVE TESTIMONY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temporal layering | Coexistence of multiple times | Badhan (architectural palimpsest), Gharisa (ancient remains) | ‘You can see the different times in the stones […]’ |
| Temporal absence | Absented presence | Deir al-Samadia (presence-in-absence), Gharisa (absence as fullness) | ‘You can feel them [i.e. the people of the village] when you walk through [the village’s alleys]. Not ghosts exactly, not like in stories. They are present. The women at the ovens, the children in the paths, the men sitting in the shade. They are still there, somehow. You don’t see them, but you feel them. The village is empty, but it is not empty’ |
| Temporal adaptation | Evolution while maintaining connection | Samad (Eid visits), Gharisa (guest house repurposed) | ‘Heritage is not what was. It is what continues’ |
| Temporal differentiation | Generational variation | Al-Samakiya (home to history, to a playground), Badhan (critical consciousness) | ‘Every generation sees it differently’ |
6. DISCUSSION
6.1 THE EMPIRICAL CHALLENGE
The five temporal dimensions emerged directly from participants’ own vocabularies. When participants said the village ‘holds all the times’ (G4), ‘is empty but not empty’ (D2) or ‘continues, even if in a different way’ (GA2), they were not illustrating theoretical concepts but naming forms of temporal experience that the 1750 cut-off cannot apprehend. The analysis that follows honours these terms as analytical categories in their own right, not merely as illustrations for imported theory. Temporal layering, absence, adaptation, differentiation and potential are thus participant-led concepts, refined through theoretical engagement but rooted in vernacular expression.
The five temporal dimensions present a fundamental challenge to the linear chronology embedded in Jordan’s 1750 cut-off. Each describes a relationship with time that the Antiquities Law cannot apprehend. The cut-off asks only, ‘How old is it?’, a question that reduces heritage to chronological measurement. Communities, by contrast, ask what happened, who lived there, what is remembered and what might become possible. These questions open onto temporalities the law cannot see. The empirical puzzle lies in the disjuncture between official frameworks and lived experience: sites that are objectively abandoned remain present in community experience; villages deemed ‘not old enough’ by legislative criteria hold profound cultural significance; ruins generate new traditions, new meanings and new futures. The task is to theorise how this is possible.
6.2 THE TEMPORALITY OF HERITAGE: A MATTER OF DUALITIES
Deleuze’s philosophy provides the conceptual vocabulary for articulating the alternative ontology that community practices enact. Three dualities—virtual/actual, time–image/crystal–image, and being/becoming—illuminate how abandoned villages remain present, how time becomes visible in stone and how heritage transforms across generations.
6.2.1 The virtual/actual duality
As established in Section 2.3, Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual provides the foundation for understanding how abandoned villages persist in community experience. To briefly recapitulate: the virtual is the reservoir of potentialities that exceed any actualisation; the actual is the tangible expression of the virtual but never exhausts it. The 1750 cut-off recognises only the actual: physical structures of sufficient age. It cannot register the virtual because the virtual leaves no material trace accessible to chronological measurement. Yet for communities, the virtual is as real as the actual. The old village persists virtually in memories, stories, practices of return and keys kept long after doors have fallen.
This virtual dimension explains the five findings. Temporal layering is the virtual accumulated in stone; temporal absence is the experience of the virtual in ruined space. Temporal adaptation occurs when communities activate virtual potentials in new ways. Temporal differentiation traces how the virtual appears differently depending on one’s generational position. Temporal potential names the virtual’s orientation towards the future; as one participant expressed hope for their village’s future, stating: ‘I hope we can renovate the village to secure its future’ (D3, 2024), because its virtual dimension remains available for new actualisations. When another participant imagines, ‘maybe one day the old village will live again’ (B1, 2024), they speak of virtual potentials that were never actualised but remain available. The virtual is the time of the ‘not yet’ as well as the ‘no longer’.
6.2.2 Time–image/crystal–image duality
Deleuze’s concept of the time–image further illuminates how communities perceive this virtual dimension. The time–image presents time directly rather than representing it indirectly through movement. In the time–image, time itself becomes visible, as duration, as memory, as coexistence of past and present. The villages function as time–images for the communities that maintain relationships with them. When a participant walks through the abandoned village and feels the presence of those who lived there, they experience the past as directly present. The village itself becomes a site where time becomes visible.
The crystal–image, a special case of the time–image, displays the exchange between virtual and actual, revealing time as the simultaneous creation of past and present. As Luzecky notes, drawing on Henri Bergson, this involves a ‘simultaneous creation of discrete temporal modalities’ where ‘past memories coexist with present perceptions’ (Luzecky 2023: 201). When a participant reads family history in the progression of stonework, they describe the village as such a crystal: the actual stones are visible, but so are the virtual times they carry. The village is not a static relic but a dynamic whole in which multiple times coexist and reflect one another. This crystallising function explains why vernacular villages hold such power long after abandonment: they are active producers of temporal experience, not merely containers for memory.
6.2.3 The being/becoming duality
The findings reveal that heritage changes over time in ways not adequately described as loss, preservation or continuity. The concept of becoming captures this transformation. Becoming is not change from one fixed state to another but ongoing differentiation, the continuous production of the new that carries traces of what came before. Deleuze’s concept of repetition is central: true repetition is not reproduction of the same but creation of difference within what returns. This is the essence of his interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return: it is not the return of the identical, but the ‘repetition of difference’ (Mollison 2022: 92) or, as Boundas (2006: 298) frames it, the ‘eternal repetition of difference’ that prevents the reification of past and future. When communities create new traditions such as Eid visits, they perform this kind of repetition: they repeat something—the significance of the old village, the practice of gathering—but with a difference. The tradition is new yet carries the virtual trace of what was. This is heritage as becoming.
The five temporal dimensions are modalities of becoming. Temporal adaptation is becoming visible. Temporal differentiation is becoming across generations. Temporal potential is becoming oriented towards the future. Temporal layering is becoming sedimented in material form. Temporal absence is the virtual dimension of becoming, the persistence of what is no longer actual but remains capable of reactivation. This understanding contrasts sharply with the preservationist logic embedded in the 1750 cut-off. Preservation aims to stop time. Becoming aims to continue time. When participants express frustration that ‘they want to keep it exactly as it is, falling down’ (S2, 2024), they reject a preservationist logic that would freeze their villages as ruins. They want heritage as becoming, not heritage as stasis.
6.3 COMPETING ONTOLOGIES
The 1750 cut-off and the villages embody competing selective ontologies, different ways of determining what counts as real, what counts as valuable and what counts as heritage. These are not abstract philosophical positions but frameworks with material consequences for communities and their sites. The 1750 cut-off privileges the following:
Chronos over Aion: only chronological age determines value.
Actual over virtual: only material fabric matters.
Being over becoming: preservation aims to freeze, not to continue.
Distance over connection: value increases with separation from the present.
Expert knowledge over community meaning: officials decide what qualifies.
This ontology emerged from specific colonial conditions and continues to serve specific interests. It excludes vernacular villages not because they lack significance, but because they fall outside the temporal framework established by colonial power. The villages embody an alternative ontology, expressed through community practice:
Aion alongside Chronos: chronological age matters, but so does virtual presence.
Virtual as real: memories and potential are as real as stones.
Becoming over being: heritage lives through transformation.
Connection over distance: value grows through an ongoing relationship.
Community meaning over expert judgment: those who maintain the relationship decide what matters.
This alternative ontology recalls what Murrah-Mandril (2020) terms differential time consciousness, the capacity of marginalised communities to maintain alternative temporal frameworks within a dominant system that denies them. This is not overt political protest but something quieter and perhaps more durable: the silent continuation of ways of experiencing time that colonial frameworks cannot recognise and therefore cannot suppress. As one participant put it, refusing the framework of expert judgment:
They [the government] don’t know the village. They’ve never been here. How can they say it’s not important? They didn’t grow up here, didn’t eat from these stones, didn’t drink from this spring. The village is important to us. That should be enough.
(D3, 2024)
The conflict between these ontologies has material consequences. The 1750 cut-off denies legal protection, funding and recognition to sites that communities consider profoundly significant. It severs the connection between people and places by denying the legitimacy of that connection. It enforces what Mignolo (2011) terms ‘colonial difference expressed in time’, a hierarchy that values European-connected antiquities over Ottoman vernacular heritage. Yet the alternative ontology persists, not as defiance but as the ordinary continuation of memory, practice and hope.
7. A DELEUZIAN HERITAGE MODEL
The villages can now be reframed as assemblages of temporal multiplicity, dynamic configurations where multiple times coexist, interact and evolve. They are not ruins in the conventional sense nor heritage sites in the official sense. They are something else: sites where past, present and future exist together, where absence is presence and where potential persists alongside decay. As one participant summarised:
The village has many times. The time when it lived, the time when it died, the time when it became memory, the time when it might live again. All of them are still here.
(G4, 2024)
This testimony captures what the 1750 cut-off cannot see: that time is not a line but a multiplicity.
Three key insights emerge from this framework. First, temporalities multiply over time. The original village already contained temporal layering, but decline and ruination add new dimensions: absence, fracture and potential. Time does not move in one direction, leaving earlier states behind. It accumulates and complexifies. As the summary of Deleuze’s work affirms, this is because:
time is not a linear progression, but as a protean multiplicity of interrelated processes and forces that are continually generating the new.
The villages are a testament to this protean, generative power of time. Second, time and heritage are recursively related. Time shapes heritage through layered construction and the ruptures of abandonment. But heritage also shapes time: the village’s ongoing significance organises memory and guides future possibilities. Third, multiplicity is not chaos. The various temporalities are structured by each village’s specific history, materiality and community relationships, resulting in ordered complexities, each village a unique crystallisation of time’s multiplicity.
8. LIMITATIONS AND THE COLONIAL TEMPORALITY
This study’s scope carries intentional limitations that themselves illuminate the broader political terrain of heritage governance. First, the research focuses on five villages across Jordan’s ecological regions; while diverse, this sample cannot capture the full heterogeneity of Jordan’s Ottoman-era vernacular settlements, particularly those in peri-urban contexts undergoing different pressures of development and land speculation. Second, the study centres elderly voices (aged 65–95) as primary carriers of direct memory of pre-migration life; this generational focus, while methodologically necessary for accessing the lived experience of abandonment, necessarily underrepresents younger generations whose relationships with abandoned villages take different forms—forms this study’s temporal differentiation dimension begins to name but cannot exhaust.
More fundamentally, a structural gap exists between the regulatory and bureaucratic frameworks that operate on linear, colonial temporality and the communities whose experience this paper centres. This gap is not a weakness of the study; it is, in fact, its most urgent political finding. The author acknowledges that the proposed policy reforms—while concrete and actionable—operate within existing state structures that remain deeply shaped by colonial inheritance. Amending the Antiquities Law does not, by itself, decolonise time. The persistence of colonial temporality extends beyond formal legislation into everyday bureaucratic practice: permit systems, funding allocation, archaeological training, museum curation and educational curricula all continue to privilege Chronos over Aion, actual over virtual, distance over connection (Al-Rabady 2026). Explicitly naming this gap as both a limitation of scope and a site of ongoing injustice is essential. The present study opens a door; walking through it requires sustained, multi-sited, intergenerational research that attends to how colonial temporality is reproduced—and resisted—across the full apparatus of heritage governance.
9. CONCLUSIONS: TEMPORAL JUSTICE
Jordan’s 1750 cut-off is not a neutral administrative boundary but a colonial inheritance that continues to determine what counts as heritage. Tracing its origins to the British Mandate reveals how European archaeological priorities were encoded in law and persist to this day. The preceding section’s acknowledgment of the limitations—the structural gap between linear regulatory frameworks and community temporalities—is not a concession but a clarification: the problem is not methodological but political. The cut-off operates as a technology of erasure precisely because it is embedded not only in legislation but also in the everyday practices of heritage governance. The cut-off operationalises what Mignolo (2011) terms ‘colonial difference expressed in time’: it converts geographical distinctions into chronological hierarchy, fails to acknowledge 250 years of Ottoman history, and values sites by their distance from the present rather than their meaning for living communities. That this framework survives in post-independence legislation demonstrates that decolonisation in heritage remains incomplete. Vernacular villages fall through legislative cracks not because they lack significance, but because the framework designed to recognise significance was built to exclude them.
Communities value their abandoned villages not because they are old but because they hold accumulated family history; because absent presences continue to shape experience; because new traditions emerge from ruin; because meanings transform across generations; because futures remain possible. Heritage value accrues through memory, practice and intergenerational attachment, not merely through the passage of time. The cut-off’s exclusive focus on chronology misses what matters most: the virtual dimension of heritage that persists in stories told, visits made, keys kept and futures imagined.
If the problem is colonial temporality encoded in law, the solution is temporal justice: shifting Jordan’s heritage framework from valuing sites by chronological distance to valuing them by living cultural connection. This requires five interconnected reforms. First, amend Antiquities Law No. 21 of 1988 (Jordanian Department of Antiquities 1988) to enable the protection of significant post-1750 sites through provisions recognising cultural significance beyond chronological age. Second, establish participatory criteria for heritage significance that incorporate intangible dimensions—memory practices, ongoing relationships and future visions—developed through genuine community consultation. Third, institutionalise participatory methods for heritage documentation and management, with communities leading identification, interpretation and decision-making. Fourth, support community-led heritage initiatives that activate the virtual potential of sites through adaptive reuse, storytelling and sustainable tourism. Fifth, direct heritage policy towards the future by creating spaces for communities to envision alternative futures rooted in the virtual potentials of the past. These reforms would not abolish chronological criteria but place them alongside other forms of significance, recognising communities as heritage’s primary agents and transforming heritage from a mechanism of exclusion into a practice of temporal justice.
The villages of two times teach something fundamental about heritage and its relationship with time. They teach that heritage is not about preserving the past but about inhabiting time in all its complexity—its layers and absences, its adaptations and differentiations, its open futures. They teach that what is gone remains, that absence can be full, that ruins hold possibilities not yet realised. They teach that the 1750 cut-off is not merely an outdated legislative provision but an active force of erasure. And they teach that temporal justice is possible, not through the wholesale abandonment of chronology, but by its displacement from the centre of heritage judgment; not through the rejection of expert knowledge, but by its decentring in favour of community meaning; not through the preservation of stasis, but by the cultivation of becoming. The question is whether Jordan’s heritage institutions have the courage to see beyond the cut-off.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks Ala Al-Khishman for assistance with the interview conducted during her master’s research at Hashemite University, which the author supervised. The author is also profoundly grateful to the 42 elders of Samad, Deir al-Samadia, Gharisa, Al-Smakiya and Badhan who shared their memories and entrusted their stories. The author also thanks the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME) and the anonymous reviewers.
ETHICAL APPROVAL
Ethical approval for this study was obtained from Hashemite University’s Institutional Review Board (protocol number HU-IRB-2023-089). Written informed consent was secured from all participants prior to the interviews, including explicit consent for audio recording, transcription and anonymous quotation. Participants were informed about their right to withdraw at any time without consequence. All identifying information has been removed, and pseudonyms are used throughout to protect participant confidentiality. The research was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki.
DATA ACCESSIBILITY
The data supporting this study consist of: (1) 42 semi-structured interview transcripts (Arabic originals and English translations); (2) archival records from Ottoman land codes (1858–1918), British Mandate records (1923–46), Jordanian heritage laws (1934–2005), municipal records and historical photographs; and (3) visual documentation (site photographs, spatial layout diagrams, architectural detail records). Due to the sensitive nature of community narratives and confidentiality assurances provided to participants, full interview transcripts cannot be made publicly available. However, the following materials are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request and with appropriate data-use agreements: (1) de-identified interview excerpts organised by theme; (2) the complete NVivo coding framework with code definitions and hierarchical structure; (3) anonymised demographic summaries of the participants; and (4) field notes and site documentation (excluding identifiable information). Requests should specify intended use and agree to non-redistribution and non-identification of participants or villages. Archival materials are accessible through the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (Amman), the British Mandate Archives (Kew) and the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME), as cited. Visual documentation (non-identifying site photos) has been deposited in the Hashemite University Digital Repository with restricted access (contact the corresponding author for access details).