I arrived back at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan on the evening of Friday January 6. After having traveled around so much in recent weeks, I stayed put for a while.
Muwaffaq, a local archaeologist, pointing out a Nabatean inscription
I had not gotten much done on my various research projects over the past couple of months, so a backlog of work I needed to do was accumulating. So after spending a couple of days writing the blog entries for my India trip, I spent much of the following weeks finishing my revisions to Nadia Sukhtian’s draft translation of Gustaf Dalman’s first two volumes in German about Palestinian customs. Over the last year and a half, I have spent over four full months on that project. Whether we will plunge into translating Gustaf Dalman’s six remaining volumes remains to be seen. I also finished an article about Jerusalem in the early Islamic period and got started on a report about the early Buddhism survey project in December.
One new development was my joining the Jordanian committee that is preparing an application to UNESCO to have the Baptism Site on the Jordan River listed as a World Cultural Heritage site. I attended a planning meeting at the Ministry of Tourism on February 1.
Among social events, I attended two evenings of lectures about ancient Jerusalem held at the Royal Cultural Center, along with the usual round of other archaeology lectures, which included Bert de Vries and his team speaking at ACOR about the ongoing conservation activities at the Byzantine and early Islamic site of Umm al-Jimal. On Friday February 3 I joined the Friends of Archaeology trip to Umm al-Jimal, in northern Jordan, where I had worked in 1984. That season I had excavated the north church of the Double Church complex, and on this trip I was able to see for the first time the recent clearance of the south church by the Department of Antiquities.
The Byzantine house at Umm al-Jimal that is the current focus of preservation efforts
Bert (far left) and the Friends of Archaeology at the south Double Church
The south Double Church
Muwaffaq, a local archaeologist, pointing out a Nabatean inscription
