Bamberg September 27-October 10

On Monday morning September 27, I checked into the Collegium Oecumenicum for two weeks. I had stayed in that university residence several times during my earlier stays in Bamberg.

I met with my colleagues Klaus and Hanswulf about our sites and monuments of Jerusalem project  on Thursday September 30. Because the end of our project is still off in the future, we agreed on an interim solution. I will return to the idea that I had earlier and publish first a supplement volume to the original German edition about the sites and monuments of Islamic Jerusalem. It will take me only a few more months to finish that Islamic Jerusalem book.

That same day I had lunch with Ilse Sturkenboom, just after she had submitted her MA thesis in Islamic Art to the university. She had attended some of the courses I had taught at the university and she participated in my Humayma excavation in 2009. Ilse did not have another copy of the thesis with her, so in the photograph she is holding a copy of my Palestinian Customs book that I had given her as an alternative in front of the Oriental Studies Department.

Ilse Sturkenboom

On Friday October 1 I traveled to Mainz to attend the first day of a conference about the Saljuqs and Byzantines in Anatolia. I met there Johannes Pahlitz and the other Byzantinists at the University of Mainz.

Among my other activities, on Saturday October 9 I went on the nature hike with the Volkshochschule to southern Türingen. At one point we walked along the former East Germany-West Germany border. The camera on my iPhone was malfunctioning, so the photograph is fuzzy.

The foundations for the death strip along the East Germany border

In the fall many towns hold an autumn festival. On Sunday October 10 I went to a fall market in the town of Strullendorf, south of Bamberg, and the apple market in Reckendorf, northwest of Bamberg.

A school orchestra performing in Strullendorf

A band performing in Reckendorf

On Sunday October 3 there was a flea market in the city center of Bamberg.

The flea market

One afternoon I went to a showing of the movie Toy Story 3 at the end of its run. I was the only one in the theater for that showing.

Germany September 20-26

On September 20, I took a night-time flight from Amman to Frankfurt, arriving at 6:30 in the morning. I then traveled to Marburg to attend the Orientalistentag conference at the University of Marburg from September 20 to 24. That is the German Oriental Studies conference held every three year that I had attended in 2001 and 2007. I gave a presentation on Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman period on September 22. I also attended a public presentation by Christoph Luxenberg on his very controversial ideas about how the obscure vocabulary in the Quran is best understood by examining Christian Aramaic-Syriac cognates. He is a scholar of Arab origin who has been living in Germany for years; Christoph Luxenberg is the pseudonym he uses to protect himself. This was the first public presentation he has ever given.

While in Marburg, I met Mareike Hilbrig, who had been at the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad in 2005-2006.

Mareike Hilbrig

The Old Botanical Gardens in Marburg

The conference ended on Friday September 24, but because I was not able to move into my short-term housing in Bamberg until Monday, I spent the weekend sightseeing.

On Friday I traveled to Aschaffenburg, half-way between Marburg and Bamberg. As I walked around the city center, I came across the national fork-lift driver competition.

The fork-lift competition

On Saturday September 25, with drizzly weather, I went to the romantic castle of Mespelbrunn south of Aschaffenburg.

The castle of Mespelbrunn, swans and all

I then did some hiking and I came to the village of Heimbuchenthal, where a six-hour cross-country relay bicycle race was in progress. One oddity was a participant on a unicycle. The fuzzy photograph demonstrates the limitations of the camera on my iPhone.

The bicycle race

The unicycle

On Sunday September 26 I went south of Aschaffenburg and hiked around near the village of Amorbach. Amorbach with its well-preserved core of old buildings proved to be a bit of a dud, because the historic abbey was closed for a few hours while an orchestra rehearsed for a concert later that afternoon; the art museum was temporarily closed as well.

Buildings in the center of Amorbach

That afternoon I traveled to Bamberg.

Amman September 1-19

I spent the first part of September at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan, working intensively on the report of the excavations at the Madaba Archaeological Park. My six-month fellowship nominally came to an end on August 31, but I decided to stay on in the first part of September to make up for some time I had taken off in previous months to work on other projects. I gave my presentation about my research on September 15 at ACOR. In the past couple of months I had sorted through over 50 crates of pottery and other finds from the excavations; in September a volunteer, Hashem ElAssad, helped out for a few days.

 Some of the crates of Madaba pottery and other finds

Hashem helping with the Madaba pottery

Among my other academic activities, I proofread a number of articles for the Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology.

On September 19, the last day of my six-month stay, I went to the National Art Gallery and Darat al-Funun art gallery in the city center. That evening I attended a lecture at the German Institute by Peter Fischer about his Tell Abu al-Kharaz excavations; that was the first public event since the end of Ramadan and the Id al-Fitr holiday.

A version of my fellowship report that will appear in the upcoming issue of the ACOR Newsletter follows:

ACOR Publications Fellowship Report

The Madaba Archaeological Park was established in the early 1990s. Part of the work involved a year and a half of continuous archaeological excavations from the summer of 1992 through the fall of 1993, directed by Cherie Lenzen and Ghazi Bisheh and sponsored by ACOR, USAID and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The archaeological park has long been open to the public, but no substantial publication of the excavations nor the important remains from the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods was ever produced. In order to write the delayed excavation report, I spent six months at ACOR from March through August 2010, as ACOR’s first Publications Fellow.

My work entailed collecting the records of the excavations. Most of the daily notebooks and other written records were eventually located, but almost all of the photographs and many drawings and top plans remain unaccounted for. The lost of significant portions of the dispersed records points out the value of working on reports soon after a project ends.

The initial idea was for me to work with Ghazi Bisheh to publish the results of his part of the excavations around the area of the Byzantine-Early Islamic “Burnt Palace” in the western part of the archaeological park. I was not a first concerned with the areas where Cherie Lenzen had worked, but it soon became apparent that her areas needed to be included since an artificial separation of the two areas made little archaeological sense. The decision for me to include her areas in the report effectively doubled the size of the project and so I need to continue work on the report in 2011. In addition to my stratigraphic reports about the excavations, other specialists have agreed to study the pottery, glass, coins, lamp fragments and animal bones from the excavation in the course of 2011, which will make the final report all the more useful.

The results of the 1990s excavations in Madaba around the Roman Street, the “Burnt Palace” and the Church of Khader in the western part of the archaeological park, as well as the Church of the Prophet Elias in the eastern part of the park, are important for the light they shed on the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods in Madaba. An additional value to the project lies in the documentation and excavation of a number of late 19th and early 20th century houses that overlay the earlier remains, providing information about that often neglected period of Jordan’s history.

Amman August 1-31

I spent the month of August at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan, continuing to work on the report of the excavations at the Madaba Archaeological Park. On August 26 I went on a day trip to Madaba to see the excavation site; I went with Dorina, a research fellow at ACOR. In the second half of the month I also worked on two other projects: an article about the Umayyads and Abbasids in the later history of Mujir al-Din and an article about Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman period.

In the course of the month I met several times with Nadia Sukhtian to discuss her translations of two volumes that Gustaf Dalman had written in the early 20th century about Palestinian customs. She had prepared her translations some years ago, but never finished them or arranged for their publication. I carefully worked through a few pages of her translation and committed to help in the coming months to check and revise her translations for publication.

At the beginning of the month I applied for a second US passport for a possible trip to Saudi Arabia to take care of some business connected with the excavations at Jurash in 2008 and 2009. Going on that trip in a few months will depend on getting a visa, which will take some time.

On August 1, I joined the German Institute’s tour of their excavations at Tall Zira‘a in northern Jordan, followed by a reception at their dig house at Umm Qeis nearby.

The dig directors, Dieter Vieweger to the righ and Jutta Häser to the left, giving the tour of Tall Zira‘a.

The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan started on August 11. That brought an end to public events for the duration, although I did meet my Palestinian colleague Muhammad Ghosheh one evening for an Iftar buffet.

On August 12 I went on a day trip with Tomasz Waliszewski and his wife Eva on a trip to visit archaeological sites in southern Jordan. Tomasz is currently a fellow at ACOR working on a corpus of oil presses in Jordan. We stopped by a number of Byzantine period sites during the course of the day: Khirbat Faris and Tadun north of Kerak, and then ‘Ayn al-Bayda south of Tafila. The ‘Ayd al-Bayda archaeological site is adjacent to the home of the Qatamin family; we were invited in for tea (they abstained, it being Ramadan) once I identified that I knew two of the family members: Nadal, who was at Al al-Bayt University at the same time as I was back in 1994, and Hamd, a recently deceased archaeologist at Mu’ta University.

The Qatamin family

We then proceeded to Gharandal and then the main site of the day: Khirbat Nusraniyah, where there were a number of Byzantine-period olive presses that Tomasz did not know about. On the way back we stopped at Rashadiyah, where Tomasz found another press that he did not know about, and Tuwana.

Tomasz and Eva recording olive oil presses at Khirbat Nusraniyah