by Sarah Islam For historians of the Middle East, medieval documents and manuscripts are integral resources to better understand the social and intellectual milieu of their objects of study. Islamic manuscript archives and repositories are often quite challenging to access; an even greater challenge is the ability to read and analyze the documents themselves. For…
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 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 Clare Rasmussen The Roman Empire was one of many ancient civilizations that understood the necessity of a water supply system, and they became experts in building large aqueducts and urban water systems. They, along with the Greeks, spread new cultural institutions that required water to be used in ways that went beyond the communal…
by Lauren Erker Rural life in Jordan during the Ottoman period is a topic that has received little attention from archaeologists. While there is a rich corpus of historical writings on the late Ottoman period due to the Tanzimat reforms, archaeological literature on the subject remains scant. Any tour across the landscape of Jordan will reveal remains…
by Danielle Wolfson I am an emerging professional in cultural heritage, chosen by the United States Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (US/ICOMOS) to participate in their International Exchange Program (IEP), an honor that brought me to Amman for the summer of 2022. At the American Center of Research, I worked on…
by Kathryn Grossman I have been in Jordan for two months now, and Tom Parker’s presence is everywhere—in my work, in conversations with colleagues, on the stiff breeze at Petra. Despite twenty years in Near Eastern archaeology, this is my first time working in Jordan; I had just imagined he would be here when I…
by Amy Karoll I am currently a visiting professor in the Writings Program at New York University-Abu Dhabi and was an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Center of Research from March to August 2021. I arrived at the American Center in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and fresh from receiving my doctorate in…
by Christine Sargent, with Timothy Loh and Morgen Chalmiers 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…
Christine Sargent is the Spring 2019–2020 ACOR-NEH fellow and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver. During her ACOR fellowship, Dr. Sargent will be working on her first ethnographic monograph, which is based on her Ph.D. dissertation. Dr. Sargent began research for this project in 2013–2014, with support from the University…
Bridget Guarasci is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellow at ACOR for spring 2019. During her fellowship Dr. Guarasci is completing a book manuscript on the wartime restoration of Iraq’s marshes, preliminarily titled Warzone Ecologies: Iraq’s Marshes on…
Dr. Gary Rollefson, anthropologist and recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow at ACOR, writes below about his ongoing research in the desolate Black Desert of eastern Jordan. In 1980, Alison Betts, a doctoral student at the time, invited me to Jordan’s Black Desert to see what her research area looked like. After climbing to…
The ACOR Video Lecture Series provides accessible discussions of new research into the past and present of Jordan and the broader Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. This video was adapted from the October 2017 public lecture delivered at ACOR by Dr. Gary Rollefson, ACOR-NEH Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Whitman College. Dr. Rollefson’s…
The ACOR Video Lecture Series provides accessible discussions of new research into the past and present of Jordan and the broader Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. This video was adapted from the September 2017 public lecture delivered at ACOR by Dr. Geoffrey Hughes, ACOR-NEH Fellow and Fellow at the London School of Economics, whose research interests are focused on…