Kuwait and Amman March 14-17

On Saturday March 14 I took an early morning flight from Mumbai back to Amman, Jordan, with an eight-hour lay-over in Kuwait. The ticket was about 25 percent cheaper than the alternatives. I had thought of ambitious plans to go into Kuwait City for a few hours, but I ended up taking advantage of the free hotel room I received instead to get caught up on sleep and emails, so my Kuwait adventure did not even get me out of the airport. The flight was otherwise routine.

Back in Amman, I spent Saturday March 15 at ACOR. I was glad to have the chance to meet and chat with Dino Politis and Isabelle Rubin, archaeology colleagues of long-standing. I reviewed with Isabelle the latest version of the Arabic for Archaeologists booklet that I have produced.

On Sunday, March 16 I joined a group of fellows from the Albright Institute in Jerusalem who had come the previous day to start a five-day tour of Jordan. I showed them around sites to the south of Amman: Nitl, Umm al-Rasas, Lehun, Dhiban, Madaba and Mount Nebo, most of them with major phases of occupation in the Byzantine and early Islamic periods. I had not been to some of those sites in over ten years. Umm al-Rasas, where I worked in 1987-1989, is now a UNESCO world heritage site and a new visitors center has been constructed recently, although it is not open yet. A new shelter has also been constructed over the Church of St Stephen complex, the most important part of the site with its 8th-century mosaics.

The Visitor Center at Umm al-Rasas

The shelter over the Church of St Stephen

That evening we attended a lecture at the Friends of Archaeology center on a Chalcolithic period excavation. The next day on Monday March 17 I returned to Jerusalem. Crossing the Allenby Bridge took an extraordinay seven hours, in part because the Israelis took a long time before deciding to let me into the country; four hours is a more typical crossing time.

That brought to an end my current round of travel.