On April 4, 2019, ACOR gathered many of its long-time supporters and friends together at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for our final 50th Anniversary Celebration. This special occasion provided opportunity for old friends to reunite, for new friends to be welcomed, and for ACOR to celebrate our achievements alongside many of the people who make our work possible. We were very pleased that representatives of USAID, the U.S. Department of State, CAORC, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and many other supporting partners were able to attend.

Remarks from ACOR Board Chairman Randolph B. Old, Director Barbara A. Porter, First Vice President Abdelelah Al Khatib, and Ambassador Edward “Skip” Gnehm, Jr., spoke to the deep and lasting relationships ACOR has formed in Jordan. Throughout the past fifty years, we are proud to have worked closely with our Jordanian partners, fostering connections both personal and professional that have lasted in some cases for decades. A slideshow of images from our Photo Archive played in the background, showcasing some of Jordan’s most stunning sites, beautiful landscapes, and kind people.

At the April 4 event we also debuted our newest publication, 50 Years in Jordan, a visually-driven booklet that tells the story of ACOR and some of our most noteworthy accomplishments over the past half-century. We were thrilled to be able to share this booklet for the first time with this special group, and to share it with all of our friends and supporters online here on the ACOR Website.

From all of us at ACOR, thank you to all those who joined us for this special evening. It truly was a fitting cap to our year of anniversary celebrations (for a recap of our 2018 events in Amman, see blog posts here and here, as well as the ACOR Newsletter Vol. 30.1). We remain deeply grateful for the support our community has given us over the past fifty years, and extend our thanks to those who were not able to join us in person, but have served as integral parts of the ACOR community, whether it be for a period of decades or mere months.

>> To view a slideshow from the event, please click here. <<

If you have not yet donated to ACOR, you may do so here. Your donations go a long way toward ensuring that ACOR can keep working in Jordan for another 50 years, and beyond!

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We were pleased to welcome at the gala representatives of the Jordanian government and royal family, as well as international diplomats from the United States, South Africa, Greece, and beyond. Rick Spees, Executive Director of CAORC, and ASOR President Susan Ackerman were also in attendance. The diverse range of those who came to celebrate this occasion with us, from Wadi Musa to Washington, D.C., is a testament to the legacy ACOR has built as an international center for research in Jordan. To all those in attendance, as well as those unable to join us for the evening, we extend our utmost gratitude for your support, and we look forward to continuing the many fruitful relationships we have fostered until now.

The evening also served as an opportunity to honor our longest-serving staff member, Mohammad Adawi, also known as Abu Ahmed, who formed an integral part of the ACOR family as our chef for the entirety of our first 50 years in Amman. In 2016, Abu Ahmed was awarded the ASOR Albright Service Award in recognition of his long and outstanding service to ACOR. On the night of the gala, Abu Ahmed marked his retirement from ACOR by cutting our 50^th anniversary cake, capping off an evening of conversation, presentations, and celebration.

On this occasion, we also premiered a short film (featured at the top of this post) showcasing some of ACOR’s many projects, including the Petra Church and the Temple of Winged Lions. Produced especially for ACOR’s 50^th year, this video provides great insight into what ACOR does and how we have evolved over time. We are excited to be able to share the final product with you today, and we extend our thanks to filmmakers Ghassan Salti and Mohammud Ali and former ACOR Development Officer Miriam Saleh for all their hard work producing it. A video clip on USAID SCHEP, implemented by ACOR, was also created for the event by the SCHEP team.

Truly, the past 50 years have been an incredible journey, and one that we look forward to continuing with your support.

By Starling Carter, ACOR Development Assistant

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About the Lecture:

Throughout human history there have been elaborate and simple ways to assist the dead in their transition to their next phase of existence, as well as varying ways in which the living have honored and commemorated their dead through rituals, feasts, and setting up of monuments. This lecture focuses on the rich and varied burial customs of the second and first millennia BC within the Jordan Valley, from dolmens and cave tombs to inhumation cemeteries. This lecture has a special focus on the findings from the well-preserved pit burial cemetery at Tell es-Sa‘idiyeh in the central east Jordan Valley with phases dating to the end of the Late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, and the late Iron Age/Persian periods. Here, and at nearby sites, evidence for highly elaborate and diverse burial rituals provides important insights into a range of mortuary practices for other parts of Jordan which are dominated by burial caves that usually have poorly preserved contexts. The study of change and continuity of mortuary customs over deep time provide fascinating insights into attitudes to life, death, the body, and perhaps even beliefs in the afterlife.

About the Lecturer:

Jack Green joined ACOR as the Associate Director in Amman in October 2017. He supports ACOR’s activities, including the USAID–SCHEP project. He also serves as the project director of the Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management Initiative (TWLCRM), at Petra.

Jack Green’s academic and professional background is in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, cultural heritage, and museums.  His current research and publication focus is the Tell es-Sa’idiyeh (Jordan) Cemetery Publication Project with the British Museum, which follows on from his doctoral thesis. He has participated in many surveys and excavations, including in Jordan at Khirbat al-Mudayna al-Aliya and Tall Dhiban.

He was curator of Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (2007–11), chief curator of the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago (2011–15), and deputy director at the Corning Museum of Glass as well as a visiting scholar at Cornell University, NY (2016–17). Jack Green received his B.A. degree from the University of Liverpool (1999) and M.A. and Ph.D from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (2001, 2006 respectively).

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A public lecture

Continuity and change in mortuary customs:
the Jordan Valley in the second
and first millennia BC    

A lecture given by

Dr. John (Jack) D.M. Green

ACOR Associate Director 

Wednesday April 18, 2018
at 6:00 p.m.

About the Lecture:

Throughout human history there have been elaborate and simple ways to assist the dead in their transition to their next phase of existence, as well as varying ways in which the living have honored and commemorated their dead through rituals, feasts, and setting up of monuments. This lecture focuses on the rich and varied burial customs of the second and first millennia BC within the Jordan Valley, from dolmens and cave tombs to inhumation cemeteries. This lecture has a special focus on the findings from the well-preserved pit burial cemetery at Tell es-Sa‘idiyeh in the central east Jordan Valley with phases dating to the end of the Late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, and the late Iron Age/Persian periods. Here, and at nearby sites, evidence for highly elaborate and diverse burial rituals provides important insights into a range of mortuary practices for other parts of Jordan which are dominated by burial caves that usually have poorly preserved contexts. The study of change and continuity of mortuary customs over deep time provide fascinating insights into attitudes to life, death, the body, and perhaps even beliefs in the afterlife.

About the Lecturer:

Jack Green joined ACOR as the Associate Director in Amman in October 2017. He supports ACOR’s activities, including the USAID–SCHEP project. He also serves as the project director of the Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management Initiative (TWLCRM), at Petra.

Jack Green’s academic and professional background is in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, cultural heritage, and museums.  His current research and publication focus is the Tell es-Sa’idiyeh (Jordan) Cemetery Publication Project with the British Museum, which follows on from his doctoral thesis. He has participated in many surveys and excavations, including in Jordan at Khirbat al-Mudayna al-Aliya and Tall Dhiban.

He was curator of Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (2007–11), chief curator of the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago (2011–15), and deputy director at the Corning Museum of Glass as well as a visiting scholar at Cornell University, NY (2016–17). Jack Green received his B.A. degree from the University of Liverpool (1999) and M.A. and Ph.D from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (2001, 2006 respectively).

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A public lecture

Palestinian Reproductive Death
and Life during the British Mandate

A lecture given by

Frances S. Hasso

Duke University
2018 ACOR CAORC Post-Graduate Fellow

Wednesday March 14, 2018
at 6:00 p.m.

About the Lecture:

This lecture emerges from a book project that examines Palestinian women’s experiences of perinatal and child death during the British mandate (1920–1948). Oral histories with women and scholarship on the mandate are silent on quotidian experiences of reproduction and child death. The project relies on analysis of 2016, 2017, and 2018 interviews with Palestinian women in historic Palestine and Jordan as well as British, Zionist, Jordanian, Palestinian, and missionary archival sources, including oral history projects conducted since the 1990s in Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.

About the Lecturer

Frances S. Hasso is Associate Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the Departments of Sociology and History. She is an Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2015–2018). Her recent publications include Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (with Zakia Salime, Duke 2016), Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford 2011), and Resistance, Repression and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (Syracuse 2005).

Frances Hasso earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She has an M.A. in Arab Studies with a concentration in Economic Development from Georgetown University and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of California at Los Angeles. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. To learn more, visit her website or read her ACOR biography.

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A public lecture

ACOR @ 50: Past, Present, and Future

Wednesday February 28, 2018 at 6:00 p.m.

A lecture given by

Dr. Barbara A. Porter, ACOR Director

Reception to Follow

About the Lecture:

To inaugurate the ACOR lecture series for our 50^th anniversary year, the Director Barbara Porter will reflect on past projects, current accomplishments, and future plans. ACOR’s mission has evolved since its inception in spring 1968 but retains as its core mission the intention to advance knowledge of Jordan past and present. The ACOR Library plays a major role in knowledge transfer and the current ACOR Archive Project allows ACOR to share images of Jordan. Many people have been involved in ACOR’s past and acknowledging the role of key figures will be a focus of this talk. Barbara Porter became the fifth long-term director of ACOR in April 2006 when she succeeded Pierre Bikai (1991–2006). Before them ACOR was directed by Jim Sauer (1975–1981), David McCreery (1981–1988), and Bert de Vries (1988—1991), all of whom followed the period of 1968 to 1975 when the center was led by annual professors, who played important roles in establishing ACOR in Jordan and solidifying the ties with Jordan’s Department of Antiquities.

About the Lecturer:

Barbara A. Porter has been the Director of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman since 2006. She received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her dissertation specialized on cylinder seals from Syria. Part of her childhood was spent in Lebanon, where her interest in the archaeology of the region was fostered. From 1978 to 1986 she was on the curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Egyptian Art and Ancient Near Eastern Art) and in the 1990s taught at New York University. She led several archaeological tours from Algeria to Iran (including Jordan) in the ten years before moving to Amman. Her first year as ACOR Director centered around organizing the 10^th International Conference on the History and Archaeology of Jordan, and she looks forward to the next one (ICHAJ 14) in Florence, Italy in January 2019 (see below).

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This summer, as part of its previous NEH award, ACOR will also host two NEH Fellows, Dr. Geoffrey Hughes and Dr. Gary Rollefson. We look forward to being a part of their contribution to the scholarly community in Jordan.

Dr. Geoffrey Hughes, a teaching fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, will be in Jordan for four months from May 2017 pursuing his project entitled “Nation and Agnation: Kinship, Conflict, and Social Control in Contemporary Jordan.”

Dr. Hughes’s research will investigate how agnation (the principle of common genealogical descent via shared male ancestors) shapes how Jordanians conceptualize and manage conflicts over inequality, social difference, and social hierarchy. He has previously done research into the role of tribalism in informal dispute resolution mechanisms in Jordan.

Dr. Gary Rollefson, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Whitman College, will be in Jordan for six months from May 2017 pursuing a project titled “Lithic Technologies and Social Identities: A Comparative Analysis of Chipped Stone Tool Production in Jordan’s Badia.”

During his fellowship, Dr. Rollefson will be engaged in a technological analysis of samples from a very large assemblage of newly excavated sites (2011‐2016) in the Black Desert, as well as from the large farming village of ‘Ain Ghazal.  Dr. Rollefson has been working in Jordan for much of his career and has previously been awarded multiple NEH and CAORC fellowships at ACOR.

The NEH “Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions” award supports qualified centers and institutions to offer NEH fellowships in the humanities. Scholars can pursue their research while benefiting from the center’s special resources or its location abroad and the collegial association with other fellows. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

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ACOR Library Director Carmen Ayoubi was awarded the W.F. Albright Service Award on 18 November 2016 during the 2016 ASOR annual meetings in San Antonio, Texas. ACOR Trustee Dr. Bert de Vries and ACOR Director Dr. Barbara A. Porter received the award on behalf of Mrs. Ayoubi.

The award was formally presented to Mrs. Ayoubi herself on 18 December 2016 at ACOR during the holiday lunch where fifty guests composed of ACOR Trustees, staff, resident scholars, and friends, as well as her husband Zaki and daughter Hanae, were present to congratulate her on this important recognition of her long and excellent service to the ACOR Library.

Read more about Carmen Ayoubi in the ACOR Staff Profile.
Read more about all the ASOR awards given in 2016.

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