A little over an hour's drive south of the sprawling resorts on the Dead Sea lies one of the great puzzles of archaeology, a city of bones.
The archaeological site of Bab edh Dhra, near Ghor Mazraa, is one of the most studied sites in all of Jordan and retains the most secrets.
The area surrounding the four-hectare city near the mouth of Wadi Karak has signs of occupation dating as far back as the Chalcolithic Age and Neolithic times.
After its discovery in 1926 by William Albright, successive excavations in the 1960s and 1970s revealed a town with a seven-metre-thick city wall, monumental structures, houses and a marketplace.
What has been more interesting to experts lies 500 metres away from the town: A vast cemetery spanning over a millennia, a literal city of the dead.
Near the city's grounds, which may have been home to up to 4,000 residents at its peak, are buried the remains of over 100,000 people - the largest collection of Early Bronze Age tombs in the southern Levant.
Large amounts of pottery flooding the antiquities market in the 1950s and early 1960s originated from the area, where vessels and jewellery were buried with the dead.
The earliest graves at Bab edh Dhra date back to around 3,400BC and were simple underground shaft tombs, according to archaeologists.
Some believe that the different rooms were slated for different burial events. However, most were not buried directly after death, and in most cases, groups of bodies were placed in the tombs together.
In the early tombs, bones were carefully piled high on reed mats, with skulls placed to the left of the bone heap, leading some to theorise that the bodies were de-fleshed and skelatised before being buried.
The odd arrangement of the skeletal remains from the early tombs also posed questions. Rather than signs of trauma, the rearrangement of the bones may have been a sign of secondary interment, indicating that the bodies made long journeys before reaching their final resting place.
The secondary burial theory has led experts to believe that most people who roamed the southern Dead Sea area at the time were likely pastoral nomads who may have came to Bab edh Dhra on a seasonal basis, grazing the lands with their flocks and reburying their dead.
Around 3,000BC, the area saw the addition of the charnel house tombs - above-ground mudbrick structures that contained multiple burials - perhaps for entire extended families and going back several generations.
These structures held the remains of anywhere from 15 to up to 2,000 bodies, and coincide with permanent settlement in the town. As the town of Bab edh Dhra grew around the third millennium BC, the type of burial system and level of craftsmanship in charnel houses improved and came to include doorways framed with stones, ceilings of interlaced reeds supported by beams and wooden poles, covered with plaster.
Some more advanced houses featured the addition of second floor platforms. For some experts, the higher quality of materials indicates a shift from semi-nomadic to a settled population at Bab edh Dhra as more permanent and wealthy cities emerged on the Dead Sea plains.
The subterranean shaft and chamber tombs reintroduced in around 2,200BC, were more advanced versions of the tombs used nearly a millennia prior to that. The Bab edh Dhra cemetery includes differing tomb types during the same period.
Some experts believe that distinctively different groups, settlers and nomads, used the cemetery within the same period, coming from nearby towns such as Numeira, to lay their ancestors to rest.
Near the end of the Early Bronze Age period, around 2,300BC, the town became deserted over an estimated 50 year period - a fortressed city that had flourished for millennia was abandoned. All signs of commerce, trade and agriculture disappeared. Only the dead remained.
Various scans of the remains at Bab edh Dhra have revealed scurvy and rickets among young children in the earlier shaft tombs - indicating a society that may have battled malnourishment.
But there is still no evidence of widespread disease among later populations to explain the town's collapse.
Bab edh Dhra may have been sacked by an invading population, some have theorised, or perhaps economic collapse drove its residents to migrate elsewhere.
Equally puzzling as the city's abandonment, is the abrupt end to the use of the cemetery. Archaeologists and historians wonder what type of shift could have stopped regional peoples from continuing the pilgrimage to one of the Middle East's largest graveyards as they had done for hundreds of years.
Despite decades of studies and reports, questions surrounding Bab edh Dhra have only multiplied. The daily lives and rituals of its people mostly remain a mystery - a puzzle locked in time from beyond the grave.