Amman August 1-31

I returned to the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman on August 1 for another long stay. My principal project was to continue work on the final report of the excavations in the Madaba Archaeological Park from the early 1990s.

But I spent a good deal of time on other projects, including during the first week of August going through the page proofs of the final report volume of the Humayma excavations from the 1990s. I also finished an article about the Destruction of Images in 8th Century Palestine, which was the topic of the presentation I had given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2012, and did some editing of the English articles from last year’s Bilad al-Sham conference at the University of Jordan. I also put in the final touches to my reworked application for a three-year research fellowship in Germany to start in 2014. At the end of the month I did some further work editing Mohammad Ghosheh’s book about Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem that I had worked on earlier in June.

Soon after my arrival back in Amman, I received copies of Volume 1, parts 1 and 2 of Gustaf Dalman’s Work and Customs in Palestine, newly published by Dar al-Nashr in Ramallah and Amman. I had spent a lot of time over the past couple of years working on Nadia Sukhtian’s draft English translation of his German text.

The cover of Gustaf Dalman’s Work and Customs in Palestine

The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan continued through the first week in August, followed by the Id al-Fitr holiday, which closed down ACOR for a few days. There were no public events that I attended during the month. Rather, I stayed put at ACOR.