The most recent ACOR virtual lecture event, “Human Heritage: Preserving Palmyra, Petra, and Hatra,” was cohosted with the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to commemorate the launch of the Getty’s new interactive online exhibition, Return to Palmyra. The presenters discussed the unique set of challenges regarding preserving the cultural and physical remains of three monumental heritage sites and the impact archaeological sites have on local communities. While not explicitly relating to the role of digital media in preservation, the lecture was a compelling example of how digital humanities content can be successful.

Histories of Exchange

From the Bronze Age through the Roman period, Palmyra (modern Tadmor) was a caravan city and a fertile oasis. As commercial trade between the Mediterranean and Near East flourished during the Hellenistic period, Syria became an integral part of these routes (Sommer 2018, i, 40–44). The land yielded valuable natural resources, such as metals, that would have been attractive to Mesopotamian and Egyptian traders (Sommer 2018, 30, 189). While Palmyra does not have immediate access to a waterway, it acted as “the middle of a sea of sands … the bottleneck of trade between the territories on both sides of the Euphrates” (Sommer 2018, 188, 190).

Along the trade routes to and from Palmyra, some merchants would have stopped at Petra as well. Caravans would have trekked through the rock-cut Nabataean city in today’s Jordan as the middle ground between Egypt, the Mediterranean, Arabia, and central and eastern Asia. After the addition of the Via Nova Triana in the early 2^nd century CE, there was a significant increase in economic prosperity in Petra, similar to that of the Near Eastern region as a whole (Schmid 2008, 364–386).

Unlike Palmyra and Petra, the Iraqi site of Hatra is secluded, located in Upper Mesopotamia, west of the Wadi Tharthar (Ahmed 1972, 103). Hatra lay between two of the most powerful empires of the early 1^st millennium: the Romans and the Parthians. Consistent interaction between these empires resulted in Aramaic, Hellenistic, and Roman influences on Hatra visible in the city’s architecture and artistic styles. Despite its precarious location, walled Hatra and its small kingdom remained an independent state and culture for much of its history (Edwell 2017, 111–112).

The Current State of Preservation

These ancient cities, while vastly different, share at least one thing in common: their potential to enrich the lives of generations to come. While European and American archaeological efforts have been underway in the Near East for a couple of centuries now, the true value of archaeological sites rests in the hands of the local communities, individuals, and institutions who are on the frontlines of the safety and prosperity of our shared human histories.

Dr. Suliman Ali Al-Farajat of the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority (PDTRA) spoke about how, with the decrease in international tourism due to COVID-19, the Petra Archaeological Park conducted essential maintenance to support plans to boost visitor capacity and quality of services. In addition, over the years, the archaeological park has partnered with several Jordanian and regional institutions to ensure the safety of the site and the continuation of the educational and tourism initiatives. One such partnership was ACOR’s Petra Church Conservation Initiative, funded by multiple donors to preserve the mosaics throughout the church (Fig. 2). ACOR funded the installation of a protective covering for the mosaics in 1998 (Fig.  1) (American Center of Research 2021).

Dr. Al-Farajat argued that one of the most pressing issues for the PDTRA are the concerns from the local Bedouin community. The Jordanian government moved hundreds of local families out of the protected park and into a nearby village. While there is room for improvement on the park and government’s part in assisting the Bedouins (Ajaka 2014), the local community has supported the archaeological park by providing dozens of restaurants and hotels for tourists, and Jordanians see Petra as symbolic of their cultural and historical identity. Without tourism, the community would suffer from an economic decline, and yet, at the same time, the archaeological park would not be as successful as it is were it not for the education and support initiatives between preservation officials and the Bedouin community.

The ongoing political conflict in Syria and Iraq has created an entirely different set of hurdles for site management and upkeep beyond typical complications due to the age of the sites and tourism in these countries. For example, both Palmyra (Fig. 3) and Hatra (Fig. 4) were the targets of several iconoclastic campaigns by ISIL. Such attacks occurred across the region and included bulldozing structures, looting sites and museums, and removing, hammering, or shooting reliefs and sculptures (Anderson 2017, 137).

Up until the early 20^th century, the community of Tadmor lived in the old city, which had been repurposed into contemporary neighborhoods while preserving the historical and cultural integrity of ancient Palmyra. The Roman temple of Bel (Fig. 3), for example, was a Mesopotamian temple and then a Christian church before it was used as a mosque, all the while retaining its previous religious iconography (Moumni 2021). Under the French mandate after World War I, officials removed the residents of Tadmor from the old city to undertake archaeological excavations and make room for weapons storage (Sommer 2018, 4–5). During the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIL over the last decade, large swaths of the city, ancient and modern, now lie in rubble after a series of attacks in 2015 and 2017 (Moumni 2021).

Notable Syrian archaeologists Khaled al-As’ad and his son Waleed al-As’ad have dedicated their lives to the protection and prosperity of Palmyra’s deeply rich cultural significance despite the forced removal of the community and its history over the last century (Moumni 2021). Dr. Salam Al Kuntar is a board member of Syrians for Heritage (SIMAT), an organization that prioritizes the preservation of the global Syrian cultural heritage through community-based initiatives. During her panel remarks, Dr. Al Kuntar discussed how Syrian schools have begun to amend curriculums to bring students to archaeological sites to educate the younger generation.

The local community near Hatra, according to Dr. Yasmin Abdulkareem Mohammed Ali, does not yet understand the site’s archaeological importance. Due to its location — which is over a hundred kilometers from the nearest city, Mosul — the site does not have the luxury of tourism to jump-start an international interest in preservation efforts at Hatra. Unfortunately, the area suffers from frequent insurrections, which has not provided the stability required for community engagement initiatives.

Heritage in a Digital World

Designations of these three cities as World Heritage sites (Palmyra in 1975; Petra and Hatra in 1985) have garnered international interest through tourism and research, and the growing and productive partnerships between preservation scholars and local communities have proven to be significant. In addition to such community-based initiatives, there has been an increase in universities, museums, and other research institutions providing accessible educational content online in recent years. From 3-D renderings to virtual walk-throughs and online events, such advancements have come at an opportune time with the impacts of COVID-19.

I was overcome by gratitude as I attended the “Human Heritage” panel event and browsed the Return from Palmyra exhibit from my home in North Carolina. In my personal experience, this type of supplementary material, in concert with my courses, has broadened my horizons and has vastly improved my experience as an undergraduate student. While some of these online events may have begun only as a solution to temporary restrictions on travel and public gatherings, there is something to be said for the long-term ability to bring cultural heritage preservation, in digital form, into classrooms and communities across the globe. For the last year, students, scholars, and the general public have been able to engage with content that they would not have been able to access otherwise. The application of digital humanities initiatives and projects in traditional education and advocacy settings has real potential for success (Brier 2012).

In his interview for the Return to Palmyra exhibit, Waleed Khaled al-As’ad quoted his father, who, I believe, encapsulated the beauty and importance of heritage preservation: “A human being without a past is a human being with no present and no future” (Moumni 2021). Al-As’ad went on to add that the preservation of ancient sites is also an act of self-preservation: “we must hold on to the past and learn from [the] history [of] … these civilizations; they represent a part of the human experience” (Moumni 2021). Thus, while preserving these sites provides a glimpse into human history, it also reflects who we are today and how we see ourselves. What a gift that is — to be able, through advocacy and education, to create, or deepen, intergenerational connections through new technologies.

I would like to thank ACOR and the Getty Research Institute for hosting this event and the lecturers, Dr. Salam Al Kuntar, Dr. Suliman Ali Al-Farajat, and Dr. Yasmin Abdulkareem Mohammed Ali, for their time and knowledge. This lecture event was recorded and is now available online for additional viewership.

You can watch the recorded panel “Human Heritage: Preserving Palmyra, Petra, and Hatra” on YouTube via the following links:

References

Ahmed, S. S. 1972. ”Hatra, Iraq.” Archaeology 25 (2): 103­–111.

Ajaka, N. 2014. “In Pictures: Jordan Tourism Threatens Bedouin.” Aljazeera, 4 May 2014.

American Center of Research. 2021. “Petra Church Conservation.” American Center of Research, 21 June 2021.

Anderson, B. 2017. “Beyond Rome/Parthia: Intersections of Local and Imperial Traditions in the Visual Record of Hatra.” In Arsacids, Romans, and Local Elites: Cross-Cultural Interactions of the Parthian Empire, edited by J. M. Schlude and B. B. Rubin, 137–158. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Brier, S. 2012. “Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by M. K. Gold, 1–10. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816677948.003.0038

Edwell, P. 2017. “Osrhoene and Mesopotamia between Rome and Arsacid Parthia.” In Arsacids, Romans, and Local Elites: Cross-Cultural Interactions of the Parthian Empire, edited by J. M. Schlude and B. B. Rubin, 111–136. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Moumni, R. 2021. “Interview with Waleed Khaled al-As’ad.” Return to Palmyra. Getty Research Institute, 21 June 2021.

Schmid, S. G. 2008. “The Hellenistic Period and the Nabataeans.” In Jordan: An Archaeological Reader, edited by R B. Adams, 353–411. Oakville: Equinox Publishing.

Sommer, M. 2018. Palmyra: A History. Oxford: Routledge.

The post The Challenges and Benefits of Preservation: Reflections on “Human Heritage” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

What can ethnography contribute to our understandings of health and disability in Jordan and elsewhere? In this roundtable event, Morgen Chalmiers (University of California San Diego), Timothy Loh (MIT), and I offered provisional responses by drawing on fieldwork in Jordan and the United States while reflecting on broader research trends in the Middle East and North Africa region. Here, I (Christine Sargent, University of Colorado Denver) write primarily in the first person to recap our event and provide additional reflections.

Frameworks and landscapes

Carole McGranahan (2018, 2) describes “an ethnographic sensibility” as:

“a culturally-grounded way of both being in and seeing the world… It is all that goes without saying in terms of what is considered normative or natural, and yet it is also the very rules and proclaimed truths — about the way things are, and the way they should be — that underlie both everyday and ritual beliefs and practices.”

Building on this generative description, I’d like to suggest that ethnography can offer three significant contributions to studies on health and disability. First and foremost, ethnographic approaches work from the ground up. This means ethnography can center the perspectives and projects of diverse communities as they attempt to survive and thrive in unequal conditions of prosperity and precarity​. Second, ethnographers understand biomedicine, global health, and rehabilitative therapies as politically and historically particular institutions rather than universal truths. An ethnographic orientation focuses on the actors, practices, and technologies that enable powerful institutions to function, revealing their tangible but often surprisingly fragile day-day-day operations. It also allows us to trace how these institutions rely on and reproduce — but are not reducible to — (post)colonial relations of value and labor. Finally, ethnography embraces the messiness and multiplicity of lived experience, attending to the macro- and microstructures of power that shape how people to make their way through the world and the world makes its way through them. While biomedicine and biomedically adjacent fields are increasingly hegemonic, they remain entangled in other frameworks for understanding and feeling fundamentally human experiences of health and illness.

From the outset of our event, the timeliness of the topic weighed heavily on speakers and audience members alike. We began by mourning and honoring longtime ACOR staff member Cesar Octavo, who had succumbed to COVID-19 just days earlier, on March 15. His passing occurred during the peak of the pandemic’s second wave in Jordan, as the country grappled with then-rising infection and mortality rates. Three months later, we continue to live through the uneven ebbs and flows of a global pandemic whose impacts underscore how biological, environmental, material, social, cultural, and political dimensions of health and illness are fundamentally interconnected. Only by thinking about these categories together and recognizing how each is deeply embedded in the others can we begin to imagine effective, ethical responses to the world being remade in the pandemic’s wake. Globally and locally, exposure and vulnerability to COVID-19 reflect pre-existing racialized and classed inequities, and these familiar patterns remind us “how certain social and cultural norms around health disparities, values about differences between certain bodies and social groups, and health and welfare structures were in existence long before COVID-19” (Sangaramoorthy 2020).

ACOR’s speaker series and fellowships offer platforms for generating collaboration and criticism — across disciplines, institutions, and continents. As enduring colonial inequities shape contemporary (research) worlds, the production of knowledge and distribution of its benefits do not occur randomly or equally. All three panelists acknowledged the institutional, financial, and geographic mobilities afforded by U.S. institutional affiliations. Additionally, our positionalities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, disability) shape our everyday interactions as early-career researchers conducting fieldwork in Jordan, and they locate us in broader structures of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and “North-South” geopolitics. Attuned to these inequities, we are eager to cultivate models to build better research, where “better” means research driven by local agendas and priorities and grounded in materially transparent partnerships and exchange, rather than extraction.

Inspired by feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and collectives such as the Cite Black Women movement, I began by mapping the citational landscape that has converged around questions of health in Jordan, along with more nascent research on disability. Citations, Ahmed reminds us, work as “screening techniques,” shaping the creation of knowledge that comes to build disciplinary “canons” through inclusion and exclusion. And as Seteney Shami pointed out in her recent (May 2021) ACOR presentation, the gaps between research conducted on Jordan and research conducted in Jordan remain troubling (and index deeper questions about research for whom and by whom). Indicative of Jordan’s highly developed healthcare system and geopolitical location, research outputs dealing with health are robust; those concerning disability remain emergent. While ethnography and ethnographic methods remain less commonly cited among qualitative researchers, an array of methodological companions, such as “critical phenomenology” and “interpretive phenomenology,” appear increasingly popular (Bawadi and Al-Hamdan 2017; Obeidat and Lally 2014; Nabolsi and Carson 2011; Nazzal and AL-Rawajfah 2018). Ethnography’s muted presence in an otherwise dynamic qualitative landscape invites further opportunities for discussion and collaboration. Beyond conventional academic publications, however, multimedia, open-access, and bilingual outlets including Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research, Eib (part of the Sowt podcast platform), and 7iber bring ethnographic commitments and methods to their explorations of health and disability. These platforms mobilize ethnography’s most transgressive and generative qualities, centering the expertise of local knowledge makers while refusing to be limited by academic paywalls.

Building from fieldwork

We began our individual presentations with doctoral candidate Morgen Chalmiers, a feminist ethnographer and physician in training who has been conducting multi-sited fieldwork on Syrian refugee women’s reproductive experiences in San Diego and Amman. In her work, Chalmiers brings together the paradigms of reproductive justice and critical refugee studies. As articulated by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice centers the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Key for Chalmiers’s work is putting this framework in conversation with the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective defines the latter as “a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement.” Accompanying Syrian refugees seeking reproductive healthcare, Chalmiers is studying clinical interactions — in the U.S. and Jordan — “as sites where macrosocial structures of power, privilege, and inequity are manifest, challenged, and negotiated through everyday interactions.”

Next, I offered an overview of my research on the experiences of mothers raising children with Down syndrome in greater Amman. Anthropology recognizes disability as a form of human diversity present across time and space. Ethnographic methods allow us to explore how people make sense of normative and non-normative bodyminds (Price 2015, Schalk 2018) while attending to the historical and material conditions that inform these processes. Jordan is home to dynamic and engaged disability activist and ally communities. It also boasts some of the most progressive laws in the region and was one of the first signatories to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Materializing the cultural, political, economic, and infrastructural transformations required to build an accessible and inclusive Jordan, however, remain an ongoing struggle. My fieldwork took place during a period of significant legislative development (2013–2015), but many families struggled with the gaps between progressive policy and practical implementation. I spoke with activists, advocates, educators, therapists, kin, and neighbors about the complexities of disability stigma, which continues to shape the lives of individuals with Down syndrome and their families. At the same time, I documented diverse strategies that family- and community-based organizations have developed to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about what Down syndrome is and what living with Down syndrome entails. These strategies weave together different resources, including transnational Down syndrome advocacy networks, human- and disability-rights vocabularies, Islamic and Christian visions of humanity, and biomedical or biogenetic models of heredity. Ultimately, I argue that centering disability as an analytic and dimension of lived experience can illuminate broader dynamics of change and struggle in Jordan today.

Finally, doctoral candidate Timothy Loh connected theoretical frameworks on language in medicine and disability to his dissertation research examining deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have recently emerged in the country, including the cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that provides its users with some electronic access to sound. Taking an anthropological approach to language, which emphasizes the multifunctionality of language rather than merely its capacity to describe things in the world, Loh’s research builds on recent conversations between medical and linguistic anthropologists about how language is constituted in medicine and vice versa. Loh asks how language ideologies influence the ways that medical professionals provide biomedical interventions for deaf children and how deaf people and their families engage with these technologies. The question of which technologies deaf people should use is bound up in the question of which language and languages they should learn (Friedner and Kusters 2020). In fact, Loh argued that this question takes on salience in the Middle East, a site of intense language ideologies where both scholars and the public actively debate the relationships between modern standard Arabic and colloquial dialects, indigenous languages such as Tamazight, colonial languages including French and Spanish, and English as a global language. The fact that Arabic is the both the language of the Quran as well as of the nation-state in Jordan, Loh pointed out, has implications for what languages deaf Jordanians are expected to know and to learn. 

Collectively, our research and data (re)emphasize the centrality of caregiving and care-seeking practices to projects of health and wellbeing in Jordan. We have lived through different stages of the pandemic across our different countries of residence, research, and the places we call home, raising new questions about anthropology, fieldwork, and what ethnography has to offer. We hope that our panel (and this summary) invite further discussion and new relationships that further ethnographic approaches to health and disability in Jordan and beyond.

Citations and Resources

Bawadi, H.A., and Z. Al-Hamdan. 2017. “The Cultural Beliefs of Jordanian Women during Childbearing: Implications for Nursing Care.” International Nursing Review 64 (2): 187–194.

Cite Black Women Collective.

Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

Eib. Sowt Podcasts.

Friedner, Michele and Anneliese Kusters. 2020. “Deaf Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:31–46.

Kohl: A Journal for Gender and Body Research.

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15 (1): 1–10.

Moghnieh, Lamia, Mustafa Abdalla, Suhad Daher-Nashaf, Abdelhadi Elhalhouli. 2021.
 العيش والموت في زمن الكورونا: مقاربات من الأنثروبولوجيا الطبيّة في مجتمعات المنطقة العربيّة. Arab Council for Social Sciences.

Nabolsi, Manar M., and Alexander M. Carson. 2011. “Spirituality, Illness and Personal Responsibility: The Experience of Jordanian Muslim Men with Coronary Artery Disease.” Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 25 (4): 716–724.

Nazzal, Mohammad S., and Omar M. AL-Rawajfah. 2018. “Lived Experiences of Jordanian Mothers Caring for a Child with Disability.” Disability and Rehabilitation 40 (23): 2723–2733.

Obeidat, Rana F., and Robin M. Lally. 2014. “Health-Related Information Exchange Experiences of Jordanian Women at Breast Cancer Diagnosis.” Journal of Cancer Education 29 (3): 548–554.

Price, Margaret. 2015. ” The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284.

Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2020. “From HIV to COVID19: Anthropology, Urgency, and the Politics of Engagement.” Somatosphere, 1 May 2020.

Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press.

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Network. “What is Reproductive Justice?”

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).”

The post Wellbeing and Living Well: Ethnographic Approaches to Health and Disability appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث و معهد بحوث جيتي يقدمان وبكل فخر

التراث الإنساني:
الحفاظ على تدمر، البترا والحضر
برنامج عبر الفضاء الإلكتروني
يوم الأربعاء 16 حزيران

وصف البرنامج:

تحكي التواريخ القديمة لمدينة تدمر (سوريا) والبترا (الأردن) والحضر (العراق) قصة التبادل الثقافي بين هذه المدين، حيث تشارك سكانها طرق التجارة، كما قاموا ببناء آثار مماثلة، وعبدوا آلهة محلية وإقليمية مشتركة. ورغم الإدراك بالقيمة العالمية لهذه المدن من قبل المجتمعات المحلية والدولية، فإن حماية ما تبقى منها والحفاظ عليها باعتبارها تراثًا إنسانيًا مشتركًا يزال يمثل تحديّا كبيراً

هذا البرنامج مقدم باللغتين العربية والإنجليزية من قبل معهد بحوث جيتي بالتعاون مع المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث، يجمع علماء آثار من هذه المناطق لمناقشة وفهم مستقبل هذه المدن التي كانت يوما ما نابضة بالحياة وكذلك الجهود المبذولة للحفاظ عليها.

المتحدثون:

د. سلام القنطار عميدة مساعدة لشؤون الشرق الأوست من روتجرز جلوبال وأستاذة مساعدة في علم الآثار في قسم الكلاسيكيات في جامعة روتجرز في نيو برونزويك. وهي كذلك مستكشفة لناشيونال جيوغرافيك، باحثة استشارية في متحف بينسلفانيا، ورئيسة جمعية سوريون من أجل التراث في برلين.

د. سليمان علي الفرجات رئيس مجلس المفوضين لسلطة اقليم البترا التنموي السياحي في الأردن. شغل سابًقا منصب مفوض محمية البترا الأثرية. تركز اهتماماته البحثية على التخطيط والتطوير السياحي لمواقع التراث العالمي وتمكين المجتمعات المحلية.

د. ياسمين عبد الكريم محمد علي أستاذة مساعدة في علم الآثار والفنون القديمة في قسم الآثار وعميدة كلية الآثار في جامعة الموصل. هي كذلك مديرة مشروع الحفاظ على التراث المجتمعي للموصل، الذي يوثق المباني التراثية في جميع أنحاء المدينة ويوفر سجلات لأعمال الحفظ المستقبلية.

د. هيلين ملكو المديرة المشاركة للزمالات والبرامج في المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث في الأردن. تركز أبحاثها على علم الآثار والتراث الثقافي في الشرق الأوسط، والتمثيل في المتاحف، وكذلك أفكار الوعي التاريخي.

نأمل ان نراكم قريباً ومحاضرة جديدة مع أكور 

Related Links:

ACOR’s Archaeological Projects Portal

Archaeology in Jordan 2 Image Gallery

Introducing the USAID SCHEP Collection (ACOR Digital Archive)

“A Journey from the Excavation Archive Back to the Site: The Architectural Decoration of the Temple of the Winged Lions, Petra,” by Marco Dehner (14 June 2021)

“My Petra” photo essay by Jane Taylor (17 December 2020)

Return to Palmyra (interactive online exhibition) (العودة إلى تدمر)

The post التراث الإنساني: الحفاظ على تدمر، البتراء والحضر appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR and the Getty Research Institute Proudly Present:
“Human Heritage: Preserving Palmyra, Petra, and Hatra”
Hosted on Zoom on Wednesday, June 16, 2021

This program is also available in Arabic.

About the program:

Cohosted in Arabic and English by the Getty Research Institute and the American Center of Research in Jordan, this program brings together archaeologists from these regions to gain insights on the future of these once vibrant cities and efforts toward their preservation.

The ancient histories of Palmyra (Syria), Petra (Jordan), and Hatra (Iraq) tell a story of cultural exchange: their citizens shared trade routes, built comparable monuments, and worshiped common local and regional gods. These cities’ universal value has been recognized by local and global communities, but protecting and preserving their remnants as a shared human heritage remains a significant challenge.

About the panelists:

Dr. Salam Al Kuntar is assistant dean of Middle Eastern Affairs at Rutgers Global and assistant professor of archaeology at Rutgers New-Brunswick’s Department of Classics. She is a National Geographic explorer, a consulting scholar at the Penn Museum, and the chair of Syrians for Heritage (SIMAT), a cultural heritage association based in Berlin.

Dr. Suleiman Ali Al-Farajat is the chief commissioner of the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority in Jordan. He previously served as the commissioner for the Petra Archaeological Park. His research interests focus on tourism planning and development around World Heritage Sites and empowering local communities.

Dr. Yasmin Abdulkareem Mohammed Ali is an assistant professor of archeology and ancient arts in the Department of Archeology and dean of the College of Archaeology at the University of Mosul. She is the director of the Preserving Community Heritage of Mosul project, which documents heritage buildings throughout the city and provides records for future preservation work.

Dr. Helen Malko is associate director for fellowships and programming at the American Center of Research in Jordan. Her research centers on Middle Eastern archaeology and cultural heritage, cultural representation in museums, and ideas of historical consciousness.

We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

Related Links:

ACOR’s Archaeological Projects Portal

Archaeology in Jordan 2 Image Gallery

Introducing the USAID SCHEP Collection (ACOR Digital Archive)

“A Journey from the Excavation Archive Back to the Site: The Architectural Decoration of the Temple of the Winged Lions, Petra,” by Marco Dehner (14 June 2021)

“My Petra” photo essay by Jane Taylor (17 December 2020)

Return to Palmyra (interactive online exhibition)

The post “Human Heritage: Preserving Palmyra, Petra, and Hatra” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR Proudly Presents:

“The Landscape of Research in Jordan and in the Arab Region: Challenges, Transformations, Prospects

An ACOR online lecture by
Dr. Seteney Shami (Arab Council for the Social Sciences)
Delivered via Zoom on May 17, 2021

Simultaneous translation into Arabic was provided by Ala Abusharif/Pegasus Events and Conference Preparation.

About the Lecture:

What are the patterns and trends, constraints and potentials in current research contexts and practices in Jordan and across the Arab region? This presentation will address these questions from three angles:

• The changing themes and priorities in research in Jordan and on Jordan;
• The present and future of research in the region in the light of unfolding crises;
• The response by research communities and institutions to the heightened demands for new knowledge for new audiences.

Overall, the landscape of research across the region appears bleak, with deteriorating infrastructures, decreasing resources, shrinking public spheres and restricted mobility. Despite all of this, research continues to take place, and there are lively online discussions and burgeoning portals for the production and dissemination of analysis and commentary on the politics, economics, and social transformations of the region. This outflow does not simply represent a technological leap or a quantitative increase. It also presents a challenge to longstanding academic institutions and practices and blurs the boundaries between academia and media, between academia and activism, and between the institutional and the interstitial.

In this way, current challenges to the social sciences and humanities, and to knowledge production in general, are not only practical or logistical but also epistemological and methodological. The presentation will discuss the implications for: higher education and research institutions; the possibilities emerging from new actors, interstitial collectivities, and thought communities; the emergence of new audiences for new types of knowledge; and the changing connections between academia, activism and policy. The groundwork for the needed shifts has already been laid through critical, feminist, and decolonial approaches in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that academia needs to take up the challenge of the times—build on solid foundations of the past but look toward a future which will necessarily present a reconfigured institutional landscape of knowledge production.

We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

Related Links:

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences Website

2021–2022 ACOR Fellowship Awardees

The post “The Landscape of Research in Jordan and in the Arab Region: Challenges, Transformations, Prospects” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث يقدم وبكل فخر

:مشهد البحث في الأردن والمنطقة العربية”
 “التحديات، والتحوّلات، والآفاق

محاضرة عامة 
تلقيها الدكتورة ستناي شامي (المجلس العربي للعلوم الاجتماعية)
يوم الإثنين الموافق 17 أيار/مايو

:عن المحاضرة 

نأمل ان نراكم قريباً ومحاضرة جديدة مع أكور

Related Links:

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences Website

2021–2022 ACOR Fellowship and Scholarship Awardees

The post مشهد البحث في الأردن والمنطقة العربية: التحديات، والتحوّلات، والآفاق appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR and the Fulbright Commission of Jordan Proudly Present:

“A Review of Selected Sites in Jordan: Paleolithic–Neolithic Periods”
An ACOR online lecture by Prof. Maysoon Al Nahar (University of Jordan)
Delivered via Zoom on April 20, 2021

This presentation was originally given in Arabic. Simultaneous translation was provided by Ala Abusharif/Pegasus Events and Conference Preparation.

About the Lecture:

Jordan is extraordinarily rich in the archaeological vestiges of prehistoric periods. This lecture will review sites spanning from the Paleolithic (ca. 1,500,000 BC) to the end of Neolithic (ca. 4500 BC) periods. A selection of prehistoric sites from various geographical settings in Jordan will demonstrate different human settlements and development through time. In most cases, early prehistoric sites are associated with lakeshore environments. During the Paleolithic–early Epipaleolithic periods, hunter-gatherers lived in egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies, traveling from one place to another in search of resources for subsistence and raw materials such as flint for stone tools. They lived in both open-air locations and caves. In the late Epipaleolithic, people built semi-sedentary villages, and, in the Neolithic, sedentary villages supported by systematic farming became the way of life.

We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

Related Links:

ACOR’s Archaeological Projects Portal

Archaeology in Jordan 2 Image Gallery

The post “A Review of Selected Sites in Jordan: Paleolithic–Neolithic Periods” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

المركز الأمريكي للأبحاث و برنامج فولبرايت الأردن يقدمان وبكل فخر

:عرض لمواقع مختارة من الأردن
العصر الحجري القديم – العصر الحجري الحديث
محاضرة عامة باللغة العربية
تلقيها الأستاذة الدكتورة ميسون النهار – الجامعة الأردنية
يوم الثلاثاء 20 نيسان

:عن المحاضرة 

نأمل ان نراكم قريباً ومحاضرة جديدة مع أكور 

Related Links:

ACOR’s Archaeological Projects Portal

Archaeology in Jordan 2 Image Gallery

The post عرض لمواقع مختارة من الأردن: العصر الحجري القديم – العصر الحجري الحديث appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR Proudly Presents:
“An Invocation to Jesus in a Safaitic Inscription?”
An ACOR online lecture by Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad (Ohio State University) on February 16, 2021

About the Lecture:

Safaitic inscriptions constitute the largest epigraphic corpus in Jordan. “Safaitic” refers to the northernmost branch of the South Semitic alphabet, a sister of the Ancient South Arabian script (musnad). The inscriptions, concentrated in the Syro-Jordanian Basalt Desert (the Ḥarrah), record the lifeways of the region’s inhabitants some 2,000 years ago. While the exact chronological limits of Safaitic are not known, scholars have assumed that the documentation ends around the 4th century CE, as there are no mentions of Christianity. This lecture will present a new inscription, discovered during the 2019 summer campaign of the Badia Epigraphic Surveys. It records an invocation to a new divinity, attested for the first time in Safaitic, that should likely be identified as Jesus. After the discussion of its reading and interpretation, Dr. Al-Jallad will explain the ramifications of this discovery on the history of Christianity in the region and the background of Quranic ʿysy.

We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

Related Links:

Further reading (Ahmad Al-Jallad)

Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA)

Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI)

Past ACOR content about the Black Desert

Badia Epigraphic Survey 2018–2019 field report. Archaeology in Jordan (ACOR, 2020).

The post “An Invocation to Jesus in a Safaitic Inscription?” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR Proudly Presents:
“Preserving the Cultural Heritage of the Madaba Region… Together: The Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP) and Recent Community Archaeology”
An Online Lecture by Prof. Douglas R. Clark (La Sierra University) on January 19, 2021

About the Lecture:

The Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP) has always been about “community archaeology,” which views archaeology as a public asset to be embraced by a wide spectrum of local and international stakeholders. Supported by generous grants from several U.S. and Italian development agencies and others, and in collaboration with longstanding and recently acquired partners, the MRAMP team has witnessed considerable progress toward its goal of establishing a new, state-of-the-art regional archaeological museum in historic downtown Madaba. And, while COVID has slowed progress considerably in some respects, it has also forced us to explore a broad range of virtual options for the study, storage, storytelling, and display of the region’s extensive material culture. This presentation will encompass recent progress toward the accomplishment of the project’s objectives and the outcomes of collaboration with vibrant partners in an internationally shared endeavor to preserve the region’s cultural heritage.

This topic was presented by Dr. Douglas R. Clark in collaboration with MRAMP co-directors Dr. Suzanne Richard (Gannon University), Dr. Andrea Polcaro (Perugia University), Dr. Marta D’Andrea (Sapienza University of Rome), and Dr. Basem Mahamid (Department of Antiquities of Jordan). We hope to see you again soon for future ACOR lectures!

The post “Preserving the Cultural Heritage of the Madaba Region… Together: The Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP) and Recent Community Archaeology” appeared first on ACOR Jordan.