Bamberg September 4-30 Part 1

I arrived in Frankfurt early in the morning of September 4 and I took a train straight away to Bamberg. I moved into the apartment that I had subleased and got settled in.

I have a small apartment in a nice quiet and green residential neighborhood near the city’s main cathedral (Dom) about a fifteen minute walk from the university.

My apartment building

The view from my window

The street in front of my apartment building

While I preferred the larger, but more expensive apartment I had in 2007, which was only three minutes away from my office, the walk to the university could scarcely be more attractive mostly along pedestrian only streets and lanes through a wooded area past the Dom and then past the historic buildings of the city center, which is a UNESCO world heritage site.

A house near where I live with the Dom in the background

The wooded area

One of the many streets with outdoor cafes

Another street with the old city hall in the distance

A statue of Saint/Queen Kunigunda, the wife of King Heinrich, who established Bamberg as a bishopric a thousand years ago, with the Regnitz River in the background

The one eyesore along my daily path to the university was a wall marred by graffiti, but during my first days in Bamberg the wall was painted over with spray paint by some university art education students as a mural surveying modern art.

The art students painting their mural

Amman August 19-23 and the USA August 24-September 3

I arrived back at ACOR in Amman mid-day on August 19, in time for a public lecture by Bethany Walker about the Mamluk period, followed by a reception. I spent the next few days sorting through the excessive amount of stuff I have in storage at ACOR, doing some processing of Humayma pottery and working on an overdue book review. I flew to Chicago on a direct flight on the morning of August 24. I will not be back in Jordan until March of 2010.

I arrived in Chicago in the mid-afternoon of August 24. I wanted to travel on to Dubuque, Iowa, to visit my parents, but travel options to Dubuque are few. A roundtrip airline ticket between Chicago and Dubuque costs $600, while there is only one bus a day that leaves early in the morning. Rather than spend the night in Chicago, I took a bus from O’Hare to Rockford, halfway to Dubuque, and stayed in a hotel there. The next morning I rented a car in Rockford and drove to Dubuque. I had tried that arrangement of renting a car in Rockford once before and it worked out hassle-free.

This trip to Dubuque was my first trip back since Christmas of 2007. My brother John and his wife Renee were away on vacation so I was not able to stay at their house in Dubuque. Instead I stayed at a hotel for the week. Once in Dubuque, the first thing I did was renew my driver’s license, which had expired on my birthday in March. I had obtained a six-month extension from the Iowa Department of Transportation, but that also was soon to expire. During my days in Dubuque, I had a busy schedule of dentist appointments as well as an eye examination. I also did plenty of shopping and one day I went on a nature walk in the Mines of Spain nature area south of town.

A meadow in the Mines of Spain nature area

A view from the Julien Dubuque monument showing a tourist boat on the Mississipi River with Dubuque in the distance

By the end of my stay in Dubuque, John and Renee returned from their trip and my sister Linda and her friend Dennis came up from Iowa City for a family get-together on August 30.

The Schick family

I also gave presentations about the Middle East to the residents of the Luther Manor retirement home where my parents are staying, and at my home congregation of St Peters Lutheran Church. On August 31, I also had an interview with a reporter from the local Telegraph Herald newspaper for a human interest article published in the September 1 edition. She had written an article about my work in India a few years ago, but this time she was interested in my Middle Eastern adventures. She was especially intrigued by my minimal material possessions that I have dispersed in storage around the world. The article, along with a short video of me, is available on the paper’s website: www.thonline.com.

On September 1 I drove to Rockford to drop off my rented car and then took the bus from Rockford to O’Hare airport. I checked into a hotel near the airport and then took the subway into the Loop, where I visited the Art Institute.

The next day I went to Hyde Park and the University of Chicago and spent the day meeting people. I first met Iman Saca, a Palestinian-American archaeologist colleague who I had last met a couple of months ago in Bethlehem. I then had a chat with Donald Whitcomb and Jan Johnson, fixtures at the Oriental Institute, and that evening I had dinner with Yorke Rowan, an archaeologist colleague whom I had last met in Jordan a couple of months ago. That was my first time back at the University of Chicago since mid-2006.

The next day, September 3, I took a flight to Frankfurt with a transfer in Philadelphia.

Jurash July 23-August 18 Part 4

The school and the site of Jurash are on the outskirts of the city of Khamis Mushayt, the home town of a number of the September 11 perpetrators. As had been the case last year, we Westerners had to have a police escort wherever we went, especially the kilometer or so from the school to the site. We were not even to leave the school compound unescorted. The security sometimes reached a level of overkill, such as being escorted into the Abha airport surrounded by five heavily armed security guards. Difficulties in getting a security escort arranged partially thwarted the intentions of some of the staff to conduct a regional survey.

Next to the school is a hill called Jabal Hamuma with some early inscriptions that some of us climbed one day.

The school viewed from the top of Jabal Hamuma. Note the two police cars at the base of the hill; a third police car was on the other side.

Another view from the top of Jabal Hamuma with the site of Jurash in the middle distance

Khamis Mushayt is an uninteresting city, although it does lay claim to having the world’s largest shopping cart – a three-storey high construction placed at the entrance to a shopping mall. Unfortunately, I only spotted it as our police-escorted convoy of vehicles whizzed by, so I was unable to get a photograph.

One day the group went to visit a nearby village with some traditional mudbrick houses, followed by a visit to the nearby big city of Abha, a summer resort city, where we visited the traditional market adjacent to a folklore museum and some restored traditional houses now used as art galleries. All around in Abha and Khamis Mushayt the Saudis like to trim the trees that line the main streets.

The folklore museum and a restored traditional house in Abha

A main street in Abha with trimmed trees. Note the cable car.

The various members of the project left on different days, and Bill and I stayed one day longer than the rest. We had to vacate the school and so we went to a five-star hotel in the center of Khamis Mushayt to hang out until our flights. After dark I slipped out of the hotel unnoticed and I walked around the city for a while all by myself and I survived to tell the tale. I traveled back to Amman from the Abha airport with a transfer in Jeddah early on the morning of August 19, a couple of days before the start of Ramadan.

Jurash July 23-August 18 Part 3

We stayed in the school where we had stayed last year. The accommodations were fine, with the added feature this year of a wireless internet connection. Having internet access was helpful. I recently was appointed to the editorial board of the ASOR journal Near Eastern Archaeology and there was a flurry of editorial emails that I could now conveniently deal with.

The staff using the wireless internet at the school

The school is decorated with lots of pious Islamic slogans painted on the exterior walls and on large posters inside. One of the slogans reads: “Respecting appointments and being precise about them are an Islamic moral quality with which it is necessary to adorn ourselves continually.” Regrettably, our Saudi colleagues did not take that to heart as much as they could have.

The slogan about respecting time

Us Westerners milling around the vehicles waiting for the Saudis to show up

Another slogan placed above the dinner table reads: “Looking at what is forbidden causes anxieties, grief and injuries in the heart. Happy is he who lowers his gaze and fears his lord”. The often raunchy dinner conversations indicate how oblivious to that sentiment some of the staff were.

The slogan about lowering one’s gaze

A third slogan reads: “It is not possible for someone to keep in his hands more than two out of three balls: health, money and peace of mind”.

The slogan about health, money and peace of mind

Unfortunately life at the school was marred by a robbery. David Graf, the project director, had gotten several thousand dollars in cash from the bank on the Tuesday of the last week with which to pay the workmen on Thursday, only to have the money stolen from his room on Wednesday. Another staff member also had a large amount of cash stolen. It looked pretty clearly to be a inside job when most of us would have been working at the site, but the police investigation did not come up with any definite suspects who will have to sacrifice either health or peace of mind.

Jurash July 23-August 18 Part 2

The team spent 18 days excavating at the site of Jurash from Saturday July 25 through Thursday August 13. The first morning I resumed excavation of my A.1 square from last season, but rain that afternoon left the square too muddy to excavate. Continued rain over the following few days damaged the sides of the square and prevented me from working in the A.1 square until it had dried out by the start of the third week. I was expecting to need only a couple of days to bottom out in the A.1 square, but as it turned out I needed to spend the entire third week excavating down to a depth of four meters through ashy, bone-filled deposits. The deeper I went the more steps I had to leave in order to get in and out of the square, so by the end I was excavating only about a half square meter area of the original three by three meter trench. There was virtually no pottery in the lower levels, so I do not really know the date of what I was excavating, other than a C14 date around the fifth or sixth century A.D. for some ash and charcoal from last season’s bread oven in the middle depth of the square.

The bottom levels of the A.1 square

But for the bulk of the season I worked in a new square BT.02, adjacent to a square that Bill Glanzmann was excavating on the top of one of the low mounds in the center of the site. Bill’s square proved to be a deep sequence of sterile sandy flood deposits with some deposits containing occupational debris, but no architecture. When my square was proving to parallel Bill’s results in the first few days, I got discouraged, but I eventually hit a substantial room in one part of my square.

Early days in the BT.2 Square

The exterior of the BT.2 Room

By digging down nearly four meters, I discovered that the building had two construction phases with an earlier wall line below. Excavation of the room interior came across a solid layer of fired bricks, including a large intact portion of an arch. Below the bricks were several intact roof beams, and we took a number of C14 samples to provide a date. But curiously below the bricks and intact roof beams was only sterile flood-deposited sand down to below the bottom of the walls, with no occupational deposits at all. The stark evidence for extensive flooding across the site was one major discovery about the site this season.

The interior of the BT.2 room, showing one of the intact roof beams and the arch

Elsewhere at the site, excavation continued from last season in a large monumental structure that proved to have mostly robbed out to within a few wall courses of bedrock. Also to our surprise it turned out that part of that structure had been excavated some years ago by an excavation project that none of us, including the Saudis, knew anything about.

All in all, the results of the second season were not very impressive and we are thinking that the site does not really warrant further excavation, so the future seasons of the planned five year project may be spent at some other site in the country.

Jurash Part 1 July 23-August 18

On the night of Wednesday-Thursday July 22-23 I flew with two other participants in the Jurash excavation project, from Amman to Abha via Jeddah. We arrived in Jeddah on schedule, with a three-hour layover before our flight on to Abha. But it took a very long time to get through passport control. There were a number of counters open, but long lines at each of them. We got in a line with a couple dozen Asians ahead of us who were taking over five minutes each to get through. So after an hour and with nineteen people still ahead of us, we realized that at that rate we were going to miss our flight, so we shifted over to the Saudi citizens line and got through passport control after just a couple of minutes.

The departure area of the Jeddah airport was overcrowded with little to offer. The lack of posting and announcements about flight departures and gates was exceptionally poor. Our flight on to Abha left a half-hour late at 1:30 am and upon our arrival in Abha, we were met by some the Saudi team members from last year, who took us to the school in Khamis Mushayt, where we had stayed last year, arriving at 3:30 am. The rest of the day of Thursday July 23 was a slow day of meeting the other American and Saudi team members, most of whom had taken part in last year’s first season of excavations at the site of Jurash. Friday July 24 was also a slow day, although we did go to the site in the afternoon and had a meeting about recording procedures that evening.

One new participant was Brian Cannon, whom I had not met since we both had taken part in the 1991 excavation season at Humayma, Jordan. Also there was one woman member of the team this year: Gabi Gudrian from Germany, who spent the season at the school processing and registering the finds. One person who did not come was Thomas Leisten, a German citizen on the faculty of Princeton University, who experienced long enough delays in getting a renewed German passport that time ran out for him to come. Another new participant was Colin Shepley, a student of Gary Rollefson’s at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, who worked with me for most of the season.

The project staff at the site

The excavation project got underway on Saturday July 25 and continued for three weeks, with 18 days of field work, ending on Thursday August 13. We followed the same schedule as last year. We left for the site at 7:00 am and with a break between 9:30 and 10:00 worked until 12:00, when we returned to the school. We returned to the site at 4:00 pm and worked until 6:00.

Our workmen were the same group of Pakistanis who had worked for us last season. They all had cellphones and it was remarkable how many phone calls they kept making

Two of my workmen getting a phone call


Work underway at the site. Note the approaching rain clouds and the overachieving workman with the double-decker wheelbarrow on the right.

The US embassy staff from Riyadh came to visit one day, almost our only visitors.

The staff from the US embassy in Riyadh visiting the site