Amman November 30-December 5

I arrived back at ACOR in Amman on the evening of Tuesday November 30. I spent the next days making arrangements for my trip to Saudi Arabia. Getting the visa at the Saudi Embassy was straightforward; I have done it twice before, so I knew what to do. But making arrangements on short notice as to what specific day I should travel and getting the airline ticket required a flurry of emails. The situation was made more complicated by my intention to travel on to India after my time in Saudi Arabia, and those plans also remained in flux.

In the end I traveled from Amman on the afternoon of Sunday December 5 to Abha via Jeddah, within a week of first getting news of the visa. My reason for traveling to Saudi Arabia was connected with the Jurash excavation project, directed by David Graf, that I had taken part in during the summers of 2008 and 2009. We had found a large amount of animal bones, which were left at the store room on site. In the meantime a bone specialist in Cyprus had agreed to analyze the bones, so they needed to be shipped to him. That involved having someone travel to the site to prepare a list of the bones and make arrangements for shipping. The Saudi authorities gave their approval, and as it turned out I did not need to travel to Riyadh to take care of any bureaucratic matters, but rather could travel direct to the site.

During these few days at ACOR, I did some further editing of the first Gustaf Dalman volume about Palestinian customs and I translated a review about a museum exhibit currently in Germany on God Feminine that Olaf Rölver, a professor at the University of Bamberg, had written for Near Eastern Archaeology.