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.