Fortunately the hotel had free wireless internet, so I could conveniently exchange several emails a day with David Graf, the project director in the US, and people in the US embassy in Riyadh.
The next morning, Monday December 6, Hadi took me to the Jurash site on the outskirts of the city, where I spent the day sorting through the boxes of finds in the site store room to find all the bags of bones from the 2008 and 2009 seasons and I started to take photographs of the contents of each of the bone bags.
Arrangments also fell into place for me to travel to Riyadh on Friday, so that evening I went to a travel agent near the hotel to get an airline ticket. That is tricky because flights to Abha are in high demand and often sold-out long in advance, but I lucked out and got a ticket for the flight I wanted. The plans for my trip to India also fell into place, although having had to make arrangements for this Saudi Arabia and India trip on short notice was a hassle.
The next two days Tuesday and Wednesday December 7 and 8 I continued to take photographs of the bone bags at the site storeroom. There were close to three hundred bone bags, each of which took four minutes on average to photograph. In the evenings I processed the photographs back at the hotel. On Thursday December 9 Hadi and I packed up the bone bags for shipment, and I passed on to him a list of all the bags and a set of the photographs.
A typical bag of bones
Since the second excavation season at the Jurash site in July-August 2009, a Saudi team had done further work, so I walked around the site to see what had been found and to take photographs.
My 2009 excavation square
During the evenings I walked around the market area in the vicinity of the hotel. During the excavation seasons we had always had police escorts wherever we went for security, but this time I could walk around on my own and I somehow managed to survive the experience. However, there is not much of anything to see in Khamis Mushayt. The one claim to fame of the city is the world’s tallest shopping cart, a three-storey tall model placed at the entrance to a HyperPanda shopping mall, the Saudi equivalent of Walmart.
The world’s tallest shopping cart in Khamis Mushayt
On Friday morning December 10 I flew from Abha to Riyadh. I was met at the airport by Ahmed al-Masri, from the US embassy, who has been very helpful for the project over the years. He took me to a restaurant near King Sa‘ud University, where we met Salem Tairan and Abdulkareem al-Ghamedi, two of the Saudi colleagues in the 2008 and 2009 seasons and we chatted about the Jurash project.
Ahmad then had the embassy driver take me around the city for a while, before dropping me off in the diplomatic quarter to meet Bonnie Gutman, the Counselor for Public Affairs at the US Embassy. It turned out that her husband Frank had lived in Hyderabad for some years. We spoke about the Jurash project and archaeology and early Islamic origins more generally until the embassy driver came to take me to the airport for my night flight to Mumbai.
The check-in procedures at the Riyadh airport were as chaotic as ever. The check-in area is vastly too small for the large number of nearly simultaneous flights that all use the same ten or so check-in counters in turn, and there is no information posted about when and where one needs to go to check in for a specific flight. The Riyadh airport rates as the worst major airport I have ever been in, although once you get through check-in and the long chaotic lines for passport control and security, it becomes okay.
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