Amman February 16-March 7

During the second half of February and into early March, I worked single-mindedly with Qutaiba Dasouqi, a surveyor from the Department of Antiquities, to produce an overall plan of the western part of the Madaba Archaeological Park. During the original excavations in 1992 and 1993 carefully stone by stone plans had been produced of the area that was excavated, but no plan was produced that showed either the further excavation areas of the Department of Antiquities in 1995 and 1996 or of the full extent of the park.

We spent six days at the site in Madaba. Qutaiba worked with an electronic distance measurer / total station to take accurate measurements of the park, with the assistance of Musa, a workman from the Madaba office of the Department of Antiquities.

Qutaiba surveying the site

While Qutaiba was surveying the site, I took lots of photographs of the site and produced an inventory of the architectural pieces scattered around the site.

A stone with two crosses

One day Qutaiba used a boom to take aerial shots of the site. He had a camera that was set to take a shot every few seconds as he and Musa moved the boom around the site. It was very interesting to see how Qutaiba managed that work.

Qutaiba and Musa holding the boom

The view from the top of the boom

After we returned to ACOR each day, Qutaiba stayed on late into the evening processing each day’s data, and after we were done with our days at the site, I continued to work on the plan with Qutaiba in the ACOR library for a further two weeks, including weekends. Amazingly Qutaiba even stayed up all night twice to work on the plan. The twenty consecutive days of full time work that we spent on the plan marks the most intensive period of non-stop work on a single project since one especially productive phase of my PhD dissertation writing back in 1987.

Qutaiba and I in the ACOR library working on the plan

The plan

Amman January 22-February 15

Back in Jordan, I spent the following weeks at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, working on my various research projects. In particular I worked on finalizing my reports for my excavations at the site of Humayma and continued to revise Nadia Sukhtian’s draft English translation of Gustaf Dalman’s first volume about Palestinian customs. I also worked on a draft of a major grant application that would bring me to the University of Mainz in Germany in 2012-2014 to study early Christianity in Jordan. For the month of February I switched over to doing further work on the final report of the Madaba Archaeological Park that I had worked on for six months in 2010.

Among the special events during the month was a public lecture at ACOR on February 1 by Balazs Major, a research fellow at ACOR from Hungary who spoke about his excavations at the Crusader fortress of Marqab in Syria. During the reception that followed, I joined in a long discussion about the results of Donald Whitcomb’s recently-concluded excavations in at Khirbat al-Mafjar in Jericho; he and the other American staff members had arrived at ACOR earlier in the day.

The group of Islamic period archaeologists discussing the Khirbat al-Mafjar excavations. Back row: Donald Whitcomb and his son John. Front row from left: Zakariya Ben Badhann, Michael Jennings, Ignacio Arce and myself.

On Monday February 7 I joined a group from ACOR for a day trip to visit the ongoing Australian excavations at the site of Pella in the north Jordan Valley. The tour of the site was cut short by a downpour, but there was plenty of time for conversation over lunch afterwards.

The tour of Pella just before the downpour.