by Nina Rozic This year I was able to participate in the study season for the Khirbet al-Muhkayyat Project, along with Kathleen Macleod Kerr, a fellow undergraduate student from Wilfrid Laurier University. We were delighted to return to the dig house in Madaba where we had stayed in 2023 while completing the field-school credit for…
by Molly Hickey Addressing the cost of fuel subsidies is one of the most politically challenging reforms a government can attempt. While subsidies pose a heavy burden on budgets and tend to accrue benefits toward the wealthy, they are quite popular with a large segment of the population, as they serve as a key supplement…
by Suzanne Richard My ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which I undertook in spring 2024, focused on the preparation of an upcoming volume entitled Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar and Its Environs, Vol. 2: Final Report on the Early Bronze IV Area B Settlements. The goal was to revise several chapters, one being a field report on one…
by Benjamin V. Allison In November 1980, the Arab League met in Amman, Jordan, for a summit aimed at promoting Arab unity, particularly against Israel and Egypt, which had concluded a peace treaty the previous year. But the summit rapidly fell apart, as members of the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front (جبهة الصمود والتّصدي) — Syria, Algeria,…
by Sarah Islam For Islamic intellectual and social historians, medieval manuscripts are indispensable primary sources for investigating what ideas and perspectives were being discussed in a given time period and region. Islamic manuscript repositories are often difficult to access and the manuscripts they contain even more difficult to read and assess, requiring the researcher to…
by Gary Rollefson In the 1920s pilots flying over the Harrat ash-Sham volcanic fields (also known as the Black Desert) were struck by a landscape that was “rugged and desolate” (Maitland 1927: 198), “like a dead fire — nothing but cold ashes” (Rees 1929: 389), whose “odious flat-topped slag heaps” instilled a “sinister foreboding” and…
by Nicolas Seth Reeves The former capital of the ancient Nabataean Empire, the city of Petra serves today as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s most popular tourist destination. Tourism constitutes the lifeblood of three tribal communities that live in and around Petra Archaeological Park: the Bidul of Umm Sayhoun, the Layathna of Wadi Musa, and…
by Miya Pletsas I had the opportunity to participate in the Khirbat al-Mukhayyat Archaeological Project in Jordan for my first field school as an undergraduate from Wilfrid Laurier University thanks to a Jennifer C. Groot Memorial Fellowship award from the American Center of Research. I enjoyed working alongside my peers, the local community, and professors,…
by Sarah Wenner Hidden below an urban façade but nevertheless essential for its shaping, a city’s trash was routinely used in construction processes across the Roman world. Before that occurred, both established and ad hoc frameworks dictated the lifecycles of urban waste, from its initial discard, through its sorting and storage, to its reclamation by…
by Kimberly Katz Many excellent studies have been published over the decades examining the impact of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on Palestinians’ lives, in the refugee camps, on relief efforts, with human development, in camp structures, and on politics with host countries, among other topics. Legal…
by Arpan Roy Romani people in Jordan, by some estimates, are as numerous as 70,000. Present in the Arab region in some capacity since the 8th century, Romani characters appear recurrently in literary works by luminous authors from the early centuries of Islam and into the medieval period, including al-Jahiz, al-Harriri, Ibn al-Muqaffa’, and Ibn…
by Yorke Rowan Material culture provides a glimpse into the important objects that people created, exchanged, and carried with them for functional and symbolic purposes. The study of archaeology requires a suite of specializations and perspectives, but material culture remains a fundamental source of information. In his pioneering volume In Small Things Forgotten (1977), James Deetz…
by McClean Pink I am a master’s student in the Anthropology Department at East Carolina University. Throughout the months of June and July 2022, I held a Pierre and Patricia Bikai Fellowship at the American Center of Research in Amman and, while resident there, used their resources to complete the data collection for my master’s…
by Allison J. Anderson Jordan’s low female labor force participation rate has long confounded policymakers, researchers, and activists. Despite achieving progress on several determinants of female labor force participation over the last decade, including increasing levels of female educational attainment, higher ages of marriage, and lower rates of fertility, less than 15 percent of women are…
by Joel S. Burnett A visit to the Jordan Archaeological Museum on the Amman Citadel or the Jordan Museum in Ras al-Ayn brings you up close with multiple examples of stone statuary from Iron Age Amman (ca. 1150–550 BCE). These impressive sculptures include miniature statues of standing anthropomorphic figures and life-size and nearly life-size sculpted…