I needed to spend a few days winding things up with the two-week project. One unexpected development concerned the landowner of part of the Humayma site where we did some of our work. Different parts of the site are owned by different local families and over the years they have wanted rent for allowing us to excavate, even though we are causing no damage to their property. In the 1998 season the issue of rent had escalated into a court case. A few years ago the Department of Antiquities purchased the site, so I was happy knowing that the landowners no longer had any claim to collect rent. The landlord came by the second day and I brushed him off. He did not come back during the rest of our two weeks at the site, and I assumed that the issue was closed, or so I thought. It turns out that the Department only intends to buy the site, but has not yet done so. In the meantime the landlord wrote a letter to the director of the Department of Antiquities putting in a claim for 400 dinars = 550 US dollars, an amount that was about twenty percent of my total excavation budget.
I first heard about this claim once I was back in Amman. After considerable discussion with people at the Department of Antiquities, I got the landowner to drop his claim, although I was expected to pay him some lesser amount when I next visited the site.
Around at ACOR for the month were John Oleson, the director of the Humayma excavations in past years, Barbara Reeves, who has taken over direction of the Humayma project, and some other members of the Humayma project. They were around to process pottery and other finds from previous seasons of excavation and work on the final reports.
On the 19th I went with the Humayma members for a tour of the new national museum in downtown Amman, currently under construction. The tour was given by Khairieh Amr, a colleague of long-standing and former member of the Humayma project.
On the 20th I went with John Oleson and Barbara Reeves to visit the site of Humayma. We visited two weeks after the end of my project, and we noticed in the reliquary church that in the meantime someone had dug a new big pit around where the reliquary had been in the hopes of finding something of value.
Me next to the new pit where the reliquary had once been
While at the site, I had a long conversation with the landowner and we settled on a payment of 50 dinars = 70 US dollars, still a stiff price, but much better than the 400 dinars he originally wanted.
After touring the site, we visited some of our workmen at their tent a few kilometers north of the site. Then we went to Quwayra, where John and Barbara dropped me off. They returned to Amman, while I took a bus to Aqaba, where I checked into a hotel for the night, before heading off the next day for a quick trip to Mount Sinai.
One objective of my going to Aqaba had been to hand over the handful of registered finds from my Humayma excavation to the Department of Antiquities office in Aqaba, but the person in charge of the museum was in Amman, so I will have to make that delivery on some future trip to Aqaba.
During my days at ACOR, in addition to working on Humayma reports, I did the final polishing of the various German articles about Palestinian folk culture written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I had been translating over the course of the past year, and translated another one. I got caught up on some academic reading and attended public lectures about archaeology, about one a week.
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