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.