Amman, April 29-May 31

After my return from my trip to the UK at the end of April I spent the month of May at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan. As my main activity, I continued to work on the report of the archaeological excavations in 1992-1993 in the area of the Byzantine-Umayyad-period Burnt Palace in the archaeological park in Madaba. On May 4 I went with Ghazi Bisheh, the excavator, to Madaba to see the archaeological park.

Ghazi Bisheh in front of the shelter over the Burnt Palace mosaics

During the month Emma Morse helped out with the project a few hours a week as a volunteer. She was an American college student studying Arabic at the University of Jordan.

On May 12 I returned to Madaba to give a talk in Arabic about the destruction of images in the mosaic floors of the region to the students of the Institute for Mosaic Art and Restoration in Madaba.

In early May I spent a few days working on the report of my excavations last summer at Jurash in Saudi Arabia. Then in the second half of May, when John Oleson, the director of the Humayma excavations. was around at ACOR. I worked on my Humayma excavation reports, incorporating information from my short excavation project there last spring into the drafts of the reports for my work there in the 1990s.

On May 23-24 I went with John Oleson and Ivana Kvetanova, a fellow at ACOR from Slovakia, on a trip to visit the current excavations at Humayma. While at the site, Ivana helped me take absolute elevations of one of the churches I had worked on last spring.

Ivana helping with the surveying at Humayma

After visiting the site, we continued on to Aqaba, where we spent the night; later that afternoon I walked around the archaeological sites in Aqaba with Ivana. The next morning May 24 we went back to Humayma, stopping at the small Roman fort of Khirbat el-Khalde on the way. At Humayma I showed Ivana around the site and that afternoon we returned to ACOR.

John Oleson pointing out a barely visible water channel at Khirbat el-Khalde

One person who passed through ACOR in early May was Dino Politis, the director of the excavations in Ghor al-Safi, whom I had just met in London. He came with some colleagues from the European Center of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments in Thessaloniki.

Another visitor was Helen Evans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who came to make arrangements for getting some objects on loan for an exhibit about Byzantium and Early Islam in 2012. On May 27, I joined her and a group from ACOR for a day trip to Qasr Hallabat and Hammam al-Sarah, where we got a tour from Ignacio Arce, who has been working at the sites in recent years and setting up a site museum.

The group at Qasr Hallabat

Ignacio Arce speaking about the site

Then on May 29, I joined Helen Evans and Ben Anderson, a researcher currently at ACOR, on another day trip south of Amman to the Byzantine and Early Islamic sites of Umm al-Rasas, Lehun, Nitl and Umm al-Walid.

Helen and Ben at the Umayyad palace at Umm al-Walid

In the course of the month I also attended the usual round of public lectures at ACOR, the German and British archaeological institutes and the new Columbia University Center for Middle Eastern Studies; I also attended a couple of dance performances at the Husein Cultural Center.