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.

On 21 October 2020, ACOR participated in the Middle East Librarians Association Annual Conference (MELA) for the first time, presenting on how our library and archives adapted to the changing conditions of the pandemic, alongside panelists from institutions across thirteen different time zones spanning from California to Qatar. Below is a text adapted from a presentation delivered by archivist Jessica Holland, which you can also watch as a video recording at the link below.

Challenges – COVID-19 at a time of change for ACOR

Jordan has experienced one of the strictest lockdowns in the world in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This began with the closure of the airport on Tuesday, 17 March, which led our interns, fellows, and residents to rush to find flights home. In the days that followed, emergency law was announced to ensure compliance with measures that included comprehensive lockdowns and restrictions on travel between regions in the country and even between neighborhoods. A driving ban lasted until the end of April. From March to June, on days where there was not a comprehensive lockdown, sirens announced a sunset curfew. Schools remained closed until September, and, as October 2020, the majority have since converted to remote learning.

With airports and borders closed from March to September, our library and archives team sought solutions in order to keep serving those who had planned to travel to Jordan for research or to lead educational tours, not to mention educators within Jordan who regularly use ACOR’s library. All such activities were now postponed indefinitely.

Changes underway at ACOR

ACOR was already in the midst of major changes even before COVID-19 altered all of our lives. In the two weeks prior to the travel ban and lockdown, Carmen “Humi” Ayoubi, ACOR’s library director of thirty-two years, retired, and the institution as a whole gained a new director, Dr. Pearce Paul Creasman.

Fortunately, ACOR had a strong foundation to build upon in these strange times. Since 2016, ACOR has implemented a project to digitize, describe, and share online a large proportion of its photographic archives. This investment in a digital humanities project—“the ACOR Photo Archive”— made it possible for our team to keep building resources for our user communities during lockdown despite not being able to serve them in person.

For those not familiar with the project, the ACOR Photo Archive includes a variety of collections donated to the center, as well as institutional archives, which in total span eleven countries in the region over the past eighty years and include photographic negatives, prints, and slides. These photographs record significant changes relevant to cultural heritage, social and political history, and environmental change. The dedicated archive platform also compiles for the first time all major transliterations and Arabic script versions of 200+ prominent heritage site names in Jordan, improving search capacities.

This project took the library from a state of providing access to resources to producing a resource itself. It brought the team into contact with experts in library science, archival methods, and photography conservation from around the world, activated latent skills of existing staff members, and trained new project staff in their roles as archivists, technicians, assistants, and interns.

The resulting increase in digital literacy for our library and archives project staff meant that ACOR as a whole was in much better position to cope with the sudden shift to remote working than we might have been otherwise.

Practical challenges

That being said, we faced some serious challenges. When we began working from home in mid-March, our main focus was our imminent project deadline and concrete target of 30,000 images to be published online by 30 September 2020. Even though there was a kind offer by Department of Education to extend the deadline for outstanding project tasks due to the pandemic, we felt that, with our strong team, we were able to meet the digitization and upload target for the project without interruption.

The immediate transition to working from home presented challenges that readers will be familiar with, and also some challenges perhaps more specific to Jordan, such as household internet access not being particularly prevalent beyond what a mobile device can provide. Mobile data packages are typically generous enough to cover most “recreational” uses of the internet, such as WhatsApp and YouTube, and so, prior to the lockdown, there was not much, if any, need for dedicated home connections. Of course, relying on mobile data is not feasible for extended periods of working from home, particularly when essential tasks include video calls and the processing of large images and metadata.

Finally, as digitization is a core component of the Photo Archive Project, our team needed access to physical photographs, We had to react fast to the rumors of an imminent lockdown that circulated in the days before the airport closed.

Division of digitization/description labor

In the three-days’ notice before the total lockdown, archival technician Razan Ahmad rapid-scanned slides to produce a backlog for her and library and archives assistant Eslam Al Dawodieh to work on in the weeks that followed. Simultaneously, Ashley Lumb, who, as project archivist, was living at ACOR and thus had access to the material, continued to scan images, which were then edited, described, and uploaded by team members from their homes.

As weeks turned into months, we moved from the immediate crisis response into sustaining workflows. We rearranged our project timeline to focus on tasks that could be done remotely, moving a scheduled period of image and metadata quality-control checking forward by several months and then dividing up the tasks involved into component parts (slide scanning, photo editing, metadata description and checking, uploading images to the online platform), spreading these out among the team.

By doing this, we were able to process and publish 3,500 images through our online archive. This meant that we almost reached our target of 30,000 images online several weeks ahead of schedule.

Second phase of the pandemic in Jordan: June–August

Over the summer, there was almost no community transfer of COVID-19 in Jordan, so staff began working in the office again. Even though Jordan was going through a period of relative normality, we recognized the need to realign our outreach strategies to account for the fact that our global and local research communities had now moved largely online. We prioritized sharing video content about the archive online in English and Arabic, in short and longer formats, and experimented with paid promotions on social media. This had great results, with some one-minute clips garnering 2,700 cross-platform views. Assistant librarian Samya Khalaf Kafafi’s Arabic-language introduction to how the archive can be used to teach the Jordanian school curriculum was made available for online viewing just before schools converted to 100% remote learning last month.

Initiating new digital projects

ACOR implements the USAID Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP), the typical activities of which do not overlap much with library and archive programming. However, given the effects of the pandemic on international and national visitors to touristic and heritage sites, an archiving project was developed with SCHEP as a way to continue facilitating, on a remote basis, the transfer of knowledge and best practices in the field of heritage preservation and sustainable development.

By collaborating with our colleagues in SCHEP, ACOR’s library and archive has been able to design and implement our first born-digital archive project, described by fully bilingual metadata, thus making it a valuable future resource for both English and Arabic speakers.

Building online user communities

The Photo Archive Project also helped ACOR build collaborations with local open-access organizations, therein further expanding our user communities. Prior to the pandemic, project staff initiated a collaboration with the Jordan Open Source Association and Wikimedia Levant to host ACOR’s first-ever Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on the theme of Jordanian heritage in October 2019 and then to offer Wikimedian-in-Residence opportunities at ACOR from January to June 2020. We stayed in touch with this online editor community through a Facebook group called “Open Jordanian Heritage.” In June, Jacqueline Salzinger, ACOR’s development and communications officer, was able to utilize this network to connect to U.S. audiences through a 24-hour Virtual Edit-a-Thon that drew participation from both MENA and North America. The June event was coordinated with the help of interns who had been repatriated to the United States in March as well as ones newly engaged as remote summer volunteers. Most recently, ACOR held an edit-a-thon dedicated to increasing the amount of information about Jordanian academics on Wikipedia on 24 October.

Lessons Learned from 2020

Digital projects should be valued as core activities—not fashionable “add-ons” to library services

Overnight, “secondary” digital projects and outreach activities became the primary methods through which we could continue to provide resources of value to our user communities and actively engage with them. This demonstrates the vital importance of such activities as part of our core library and archives services.

Collaborate in order to weather the storm together

The 2020 Middle East Librarians Association conference—held, as you might expect in 2020, online—presented an opportunity for us to share how ACOR has been adapting to pandemic circumstances and to see how others have as well. This has demonstrated MELA’s immense value as a support system of global reach. Ultimately, we always have so much to learn from one another, but now more than ever, this transfer of knowledge and advice between professionals across the field has become a lifeline.

About the author:

Jessica Holland is the ACOR archivist. Her work specializes in digital curation and outreach activities as part of a long-term strategy to make ACOR’s significant archival holdings more accessible to the public.  Jessica’s background is in art history, curation and museums. She received her B.A. from the University of Cambridge in History of Art (2013), and her M.A. from SOAS, University of London in Near and Middle Eastern studies with intensive Arabic, having submitted her thesis within the digital humanities field (2018).

You can read more about the ACOR Photo Archive Project (2016–2020) at photoarchive.acorjordan.org.

Browse the over 30,000 published images for yourself at acor.digitalrelab.com

Subscribe to ACOR by email and on Youtube to receive future updates on content like this!

The post MELA Presentation: Lockdown and locked out of access to knowledge? appeared first on ACOR Jordan.

ACOR Proudly Presents:
“Heritage vs. Development: The Bayt Ras Tomb Project 2017–2019”
An Online Lecture by Jehad Haron on September 29, 2020

About the Lecture:

In November 2016, a Roman-era tomb was discovered in the town of Bayt Ras, Irbid, by a team working to dig a sewage line in the area. In 2017, USAID SCHEP worked with the Department of Antiquities (DOA) and ACOR to form an international consortium with partners from Italy (ISCR and ISPRA) and France (CNRS and Ifpo) to document and preserve this important discovery. The consortium has worked hard over the last three years to reveal the secrets of this tomb. In this lecture, Bayt Ras Tomb Project Co-Director Jehad Haron will present on behalf of the project the main accomplishments so far, and explain what this tomb can tell us about ancient Capitolias, one of the Roman Decapolis cities.

Prepared By:

Jehad Haron, Deputy Chief of Party and CHR Development Lead, USAID SCHEP; Co-Director, Bayt Ras Tomb Project
Nizar Al Adarbeh, Chief of Party, USAID SCHEP
Ahmad Lash, Head of Loans Division and International Cooperation, Department of Antiquities; Co-Director, Bayt Ras Tomb Project
Amjad Batayneh, Assistant to the Director General, Department of Antiquities

Presented By:

Jehad Haron, Deputy Chief of Party and CHR Development Lead, USAID SCHEP; Co-Director, Bayt Ras Tomb Project

About the Lecturer:

Jehad Haron has served as CHR Development Lead for USAID SCHEP since May 2016, and as Deputy Chief of Party since November 2018. He joined SCHEP after a 24-year career with the Department of Antiquities, which took him from Wadi Araba to Azraq and everywhere in between, working as an Inspector of Antiquities, Chief of Bureau, Director of Excavations and Surveys, Director of Site Management, and Technical Assistant to the Director General. Jehad has experience in 22 international projects and 12 salvage excavations, and has authored 3 books and numerous articles. In addition to his position within SCHEP, Jehad serves as Co-Director of the Bayt Ras Tomb Project.

A recent ACOR lecture given in Arabic may be found here. 

For more content such as this, please subscribe to Insights and ACOR’s YouTube channel.

The post Heritage vs. Development: The Bayt Ras Tomb Project 2017–2019 appeared first on ACOR Jordan.