Amman August 1-31

I spent the month of August at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan, continuing to work on the report of the excavations at the Madaba Archaeological Park. On August 26 I went on a day trip to Madaba to see the excavation site; I went with Dorina, a research fellow at ACOR. In the second half of the month I also worked on two other projects: an article about the Umayyads and Abbasids in the later history of Mujir al-Din and an article about Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Ottoman period.

In the course of the month I met several times with Nadia Sukhtian to discuss her translations of two volumes that Gustaf Dalman had written in the early 20th century about Palestinian customs. She had prepared her translations some years ago, but never finished them or arranged for their publication. I carefully worked through a few pages of her translation and committed to help in the coming months to check and revise her translations for publication.

At the beginning of the month I applied for a second US passport for a possible trip to Saudi Arabia to take care of some business connected with the excavations at Jurash in 2008 and 2009. Going on that trip in a few months will depend on getting a visa, which will take some time.

On August 1, I joined the German Institute’s tour of their excavations at Tall Zira‘a in northern Jordan, followed by a reception at their dig house at Umm Qeis nearby.

The dig directors, Dieter Vieweger to the righ and Jutta Häser to the left, giving the tour of Tall Zira‘a.

The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan started on August 11. That brought an end to public events for the duration, although I did meet my Palestinian colleague Muhammad Ghosheh one evening for an Iftar buffet.

On August 12 I went on a day trip with Tomasz Waliszewski and his wife Eva on a trip to visit archaeological sites in southern Jordan. Tomasz is currently a fellow at ACOR working on a corpus of oil presses in Jordan. We stopped by a number of Byzantine period sites during the course of the day: Khirbat Faris and Tadun north of Kerak, and then ‘Ayn al-Bayda south of Tafila. The ‘Ayd al-Bayda archaeological site is adjacent to the home of the Qatamin family; we were invited in for tea (they abstained, it being Ramadan) once I identified that I knew two of the family members: Nadal, who was at Al al-Bayt University at the same time as I was back in 1994, and Hamd, a recently deceased archaeologist at Mu’ta University.

The Qatamin family

We then proceeded to Gharandal and then the main site of the day: Khirbat Nusraniyah, where there were a number of Byzantine-period olive presses that Tomasz did not know about. On the way back we stopped at Rashadiyah, where Tomasz found another press that he did not know about, and Tuwana.

Tomasz and Eva recording olive oil presses at Khirbat Nusraniyah