Amman September 18-October 1

During the second half of September I continued to stay at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, with my main goal being to finish the Humayma excavation reports. John Oleson, the director of the Humayma project arrived on the evening of September 17 for a two-week stay, and so I shifted to high gear on my chapters during his stay; Yvonne Gerber, the ceramicist for the project, was also around at ACOR. By the end of my stay, I had finalized the reports of my excavations of three of the Byzantine period churches at the site, but still needed some more days to finish the chapter on the marble pieces found during the excavation seasons and write some concluding remarks about early Christianity at Humayma.
  

John Oleson and I discussing the Humayma report.

I mostly put aside any further work on the Gustaf Dalman volumes, but continued to work some evenings on the captions for Humberto da Silveira’s Masjid al-Aqsa book. I also proofread the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology, and finished proofreading the Lot’s Cave excavation report, so these days were particularly productive. I can tell whether I am having an especially productive day, if I can motivate myself to work the full morning long until lunch at 2:00 without stopping to take a nap.

Muhammad Ghosheh was also around in Amman once again and he came by ACOR a few times to discuss his Dome of the Rock book that he is preparing. One evening he, Ali Bawwab, a Jordanian scholar interested in Jerusalem, and I went out for dinner.

Muhammad Ghosheh and Ali Bawwab

Among other social activities, on September 21 John Oleson gave a public lecture at ACOR about Roman architectural disasters, which was followed by a reception. The German Institute also hosted a reception on September 28. Also on Friday September I joined the Friends of Archaeology trip to sites on the south side of Amman, some of which I had not been to before. This was the first time I had been on a Friends’ trip for some years. We went to see an Iron Age site at Mabraq, another Iron Age site at Qasr Irmidan, then the Roman necropolis at the Cave of the Sleepers site, important in the Islamic tradition, a Roman temple converted into a church at Khuraybat al-Suq, a Roman mausoleum at Qasr al-Radinah and finally the Umayyad palace at Mshatta.

Owen Chesnut and Christoph Eger, two scholars at ACOR these days, at one of the Roman rock-cut tombs at the Cave of the Sleepers site.

The Friends of Archaeology group at Mshatta, in front of the recently reconstructed arches.

Amman August 17-September 17

I arrived back in Amman on August 17 and spent the following weeks staying once again at the American Center of Oriental Research. I stayed put, without going on any trips.

Me in the ACOR library

I worked on a number of different projects. I spent a few days working on the Jerusalem sites and monuments project. My Palestinian colleague, Muhammad Ghosheh, was in Jordan and he came by ACOR a few times. I got to see his most recent publication – five volumes of historical photographs of Jerusalem. He is now working on a spectacular book about the Dome of the Rock. But I soon put the Jerusalem project mostly aside until I will return to Bamberg in the summer of 2012.

I also resumed work on the Gustaf Dalman translation project. I continued to work through the draft translation that Nadia Sukhtian had prepared of volume 1, part 2 of his series of volumes about Palestinian customs.

I also did some further planning for my project to survey some early Buddhist sites in India in December, involving emails and a Skype call with my colleague Rani Sarma in Visakhapatnam. The pieces have now fallen into place for that project.

I also got started on a new project – a book about the Masjid al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem. Humberto da Silveira, a Brazilian photographer who lives in Riyadh, contacted me concerning a picture book about the Masjid al-Aqsa that he has been working on. He wants me to write a chapter to accompany his couple hundred photographs and write the captions. He will pay me so well that I could not refuse.

Dino Politis, the director of the excavation at Deir ‘Ayn ‘Abata (Lot’s Cave), in which I had participated in the 1990s, was also around for a few days. I did some further proofreading of his final excavation report.

One afternoon I met the photographer Bill Lyons, who is taking the photographs for the upcoming Metropolitan Museum exhibit on Byzantine and early Islamic art, for which I have written some of the catalogue entries. I joined him during his session photographing a metal vessel from the Umayyad period that I have written the entry for. I went with Dino to meet him at the Spanish archaeological mission in Amman, headed by Ignacio Arce.

Bill taking his photographs

Dino showing the Lot’s Cave volume to Ignacio

But the main objective of my being back at ACOR this time around was to work on the final report of my excavations at the site of Humayma from the 1990s. The reports have been mostly done for a while, so this stay is to be the final push to get them completely done. For some days I had a good work rhythm. I would work on the Humayma reports in the morning until lunch at 2:00, then after a nap work on the Dalman translation for a couple of hours in the late afternoon, and then work on the Masjid al-Aqsa chapter in the late evening until around midnight.

One unusual event of the month was when an absentee ballot unexpectedly arrived in the mail for the upcoming school board elections in Dubuque, Iowa. So I spent a few hours browsing the internet, trying to get some information about who to vote for. Some of the candidates had a couple minute long video posted on the Dubuque Telegraph Herald newspaper website, and if articulateness is a virtue for members of a school board, several candidates were failures.

Bamberg August 1-16

In the first half of August I continued to live in Bamberg. I continued to work mostly on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project, concentrating  on accounts of western pilgrims and travelers to the city and their descriptions of the Masjid al-Aqsa compound.

Teaching at the university ended at the end of July, but exam period lasted for the following two weeks. Beginning about halfway through the semester, the university libraries have been heavily used during the day time to the point that virtually all the available desks have been in use, so I shifted my schedule to work in the libraries mostly in the evenings up to the extended closing hour of midnight.

The theology library filled to capacity. That’s my computer on the desk at the far right end of the row.

One trip I made out of the city was on August 2, when I went to Nürnberg to meet Ute Verstegen, a professor of Christian archaeology at the University of Erlangen/Nürnberg, and Sebastian, a student of hers, for lunch. I had most recently met Ute at the conference last month in Heidelberg.

Ute, Sebastian and me in Nürnberg

That day was the first really sunny day in quite some time. July had been remarkably cold, cloudy and rainy, which continued in August as well. With daily highs mostly in the 60s or at best low 70s, I had to wear a jacket around half of the days.

After meeting Ute and Sebastian, the day was too sunny to return directly to Bamberg, so I stopped off in Erlangen, half way to Bamberg, to go to the park around the university and the botanical gardens.

A flower bed in the Erlangen park

The Botanical Gardens in Erlangen

Bamberg has many attractive features, among them the fresh produce market along the main pedestrian street in the center of the old city.

Some of the fresh produce vendors in Bamberg

Bamberg also has an active city-wide recycling program. Every two weeks is yellow sack day for plastic and metal, which need to be put in yellow sacks for collection. Blue bins are for paper.

Yellow sack day in Bamberg. My apartment is the one with the green shutters in the center of the photograph.

My current stay in Germany came to an end, when on the morning of Tuesday August 16 I took a train to  Frankfurt for a flight back to Amman, Jordan. The least expensive ticket was with Baltic Air, which entailed a first leg to Riga and then a quick transfer to the flight on to Amman. That was a few hours longer than a direct flight, but significantly cheaper.