Amman February 16-March 7

During the second half of February and into early March, I worked single-mindedly with Qutaiba Dasouqi, a surveyor from the Department of Antiquities, to produce an overall plan of the western part of the Madaba Archaeological Park. During the original excavations in 1992 and 1993 carefully stone by stone plans had been produced of the area that was excavated, but no plan was produced that showed either the further excavation areas of the Department of Antiquities in 1995 and 1996 or of the full extent of the park.

We spent six days at the site in Madaba. Qutaiba worked with an electronic distance measurer / total station to take accurate measurements of the park, with the assistance of Musa, a workman from the Madaba office of the Department of Antiquities.

Qutaiba surveying the site

While Qutaiba was surveying the site, I took lots of photographs of the site and produced an inventory of the architectural pieces scattered around the site.

A stone with two crosses

One day Qutaiba used a boom to take aerial shots of the site. He had a camera that was set to take a shot every few seconds as he and Musa moved the boom around the site. It was very interesting to see how Qutaiba managed that work.

Qutaiba and Musa holding the boom

The view from the top of the boom

After we returned to ACOR each day, Qutaiba stayed on late into the evening processing each day’s data, and after we were done with our days at the site, I continued to work on the plan with Qutaiba in the ACOR library for a further two weeks, including weekends. Amazingly Qutaiba even stayed up all night twice to work on the plan. The twenty consecutive days of full time work that we spent on the plan marks the most intensive period of non-stop work on a single project since one especially productive phase of my PhD dissertation writing back in 1987.

Qutaiba and I in the ACOR library working on the plan

The plan