The Humayma staff members were around until the end of May. John Oleson had noticed that a large number of sherds to be published did not have their color recorded. So I went to the Department of Antiquities store rooms, where I had not been before, to try to find the sherds in question; I was only able to locate a couple dozen of them.
On May 28 the second issue was released of the new Journal of Epigraphy and Rock Drawings that the Department of Antiquities publishes. It contains an article of mine about an Ottoman inscription in Jerusalem.
I spent most of my time at ACOR, although on June 2 I went with Dino Politis on a two-day trip to the Dead Sea. We met Sean Kingsley, a marine archaeologist from the UK, and we toured sites along the shore of the Dead Sea, including the Herodian site of Ayn Zara and the Ottoman fort at Haditha. We walked along the shore of the Dead Sea at the northern end of the Lisan peninsula and then went to Ghor al-Safi to see the new archaeological museum that Dino has been working to set up. The museum will be a wonderful facility, once it opens in a year or so.
We toured the Lot’s Cave site, where I had worked with Dino in earlier years, especially in 1994, and other sites in the Ghor al-Safi area.
Dino at the entrance to Lot’s Cave
Dino and Me in the apse of the church at Lot’s Cave
We went into the city of Ghor al-Safi and while Dino went to get a haircut, Sean and I took a cat nap in the car with the air conditioning on. That few minutes proved to be long enough to drain the car battery, so the car would not start. A friend of Dino was able to get the car started again eventually and we dropped Sean off at his hotel, before Dino and I returned to the Lot’s Cave dig house in Mazra‘a for the night. That may well be the last time that I will stay in the Mazra‘a dig house, where I have stayed off and on for twenty years. Once the Lot’s Cave Museum, with hostel facilities for dig teams, opens, Dino will shift his base of operations to there.
The next day we hiked up the lower stretch of a Roman road from the Dead Sea up to the Kerak plateau. After a couple of hour hike, we drove to Kerak and I got off at the bus station so that I could return to ACOR in time for an afternoon presentation about the new MEGA data base of archaeological sites in Jordan. A second evening lecture about Roman baths given by Robert Darby, currently one of the ACOR fellows, and a reception followed.
That talk about Roman baths was one of the usual round of public lectures on archaeology, but one talk I attended was on a completely different topic. Michael Gross, from the US, spoke about Catholic revival missions in mid-19th century Germany. That talk helped me to understand better what was involved in the Catholic-Protestant Kulturkampf in 19th century Germany.
I also went to see Adnan al-Bakhit, a historian at the University of Jordan, who heads a center for the history of Bilad al-Sham. We discussed the possibility of having the Bilad al-Sham committee publish my collection of translated German articles written in the late 19th and early 20th century about Palestinian culture. Meanwhile ACOR’s publication of my little Arabic for Archaeologists booklet remains stalled due to a computer formatting glitch that can not be resolved until Isabelle Rubin, who did the page layout, returns in a couple of months from a trip to the UK.
On June 20 I traveled to Aqaba and the following morning I finally was able to hand over the registered finds from my recent Humayma excavation season to the Department of Antiquities office. When I returned to Amman, I needed to stay in an inexpensive hotel, because ACOR was now full for a couple of months with a group of American college students studying Arabic. My final night in Amman on June 24 there was a big reception at the German archaeological institute.
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