he Wadi Arabah was no barrier to Lawrence of Arabia. From the village of Buseira, he and four companions rode camels down the zigzags of a steep pass through bare rock of many colors, down into the heat at the bottom of the abyss. Above, he wrote, "the cliffs and hills so drew together that hardly did the stars shine into its pitchy blackness."

Soon the travelers emerged from the narrow valley in the east and crossed miles of the open Wadi Arabah, a desolate and below-sea-level rent in the earth's surface running from the Dead Sea south to the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a section of the Great Rift Valley, which extends from southern Turkey through much of Africa.

The 110-mile-long wadi today is the tightly controlled boundary between the Negev of Israel and southern Jordan. The sparsely populated and largely undeveloped region is an object of increasing fascination among scholars who pursue what could be called the archaeology of borderlands.

To the concern of archaeologists, Israel and Jordan are casting covetous eyes on the region for a pipeline or canal to replenish the declining Dead Sea with water from the Red Sea. Unesco is considering designation of the entire Rift Valley as a World Heritage site, an action that could encourage more research in places like the Wadi Arabah.

In "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," T. E. Lawrence described in his evocative style the depths of Arabah as "a strange place, sterile with salt, like a rough sea suddenly stilled, with all its tossing waves transformed into hard, fibrous earth, very grey under to-night's half-moon."

After an arduous journey 5,000 feet down, 3,000 feet up, the travelers finally climbed out of the valley at daybreak and proceeded across a plain in Palestine to Beersheba. They covered 80 miles to join British forces. It was February 1918, in the waning months of World War I and the Allied campaign against Turkey, another time of turmoil in the Mideast.

Lawrence's adventure, crossing one of nature's more formidable obstacles to human interaction, was no mean feat, but not unheard of. History and archaeology show that for centuries, from the Stone Age through biblical times and successive empires, crossings were possible and, sometimes, regular occurrences. People traversed Arabah for trade and plunder, refuge and revenge, love and reunion.

"What we've all regarded as a border between warring nations for hundreds, if not thousands, of years was no border or barrier at all in terms of trade, resources and water," Dr. Piotr Bienkowski, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester in England, said. "Only in the last couple of generations has it become a modern fixed boundary. Only in that time have archaeologists been conditioned to think of it as a barrier."

Archaeologists may study the past, but they live in the present. For the last half-century, the boundary along Arabah has been fenced and guarded, sometimes with land mines, especially from 1948 to 1994, when Israel and Jordan were at war.

But a closer examination of historical texts and new excavations have changed minds. At a symposium last month in Atlanta, scholars acknowledged that the rugged valley, though clearly an impediment, was much less of a social and economic divide than they had thought.

The symposium, "Crossing the Rift: Resources, Routes, Settlement Patterns and Interactions in the Wadi Arabah," was seen as a modest and cautious step in an effort to expand archaeological investigation of the Arabah region and encourage more cooperation and coordination between researchers working on each side of the Israeli-Jordanian border. No one pretended that the prospects for immediate success were bright, given the volatility of Middle East politics.

The meeting was organized by Dr. Bienkowski, who excavates in Jordan, and Dr. Katharina Galor of Brown, who specializes in the archaeology of Israel. It was held with the annual conference of the American Schools of Oriental Research, an organization of scholars of Mideastern antiquity.

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