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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Since ACOR’s founding in 1968, Chef Mohammed (Abu Ahmed) Adawi has been preparing meals for ACOR fellows, staff, board members, and guests – and helping ACOR create a sense of community in Jordan. We are pleased that ASOR (the American Schools of Oriental Research) recently recognized Abu Ahmed with its W. F. Albright Service Award for his outstanding service contribution to ACOR.

In honor of this important recognition, we share ACOR Director Barbara Porter’s touching profile of Abu Ahmed’s remarkable career and the significant contributions he has made over the years to the center’s success.

Mohammed, the eldest of five children, comes from the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, located northwest of Hebron, where his father was a shopkeeper. When the Adawis became refugees in 1948, the family moved to a camp in Jericho. Already at a young age, Mohammed had become the family’s main breadwinner and made money selling things, including kerosene for lamps. He even had an early job working on the construction of the Sweileh-Naur Road which leads from Amman to the Jordan Valley.

The family place in the Jericho camp was located near Tell es Sultan and in 1956 he was registered by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon to be one of the workers at the site. Getting his foot into the Jericho excavation was the initial key to his future work with archaeologists. He first assisted Philip Hammond whose trench demanded heavy dirt moving, so Mohammed was glad to switch to Henk Franken’s area where the work was more delicate. A year later, Franken engaged him to run his project house in Jericho. Thus he was no longer working on site but supporting archaeological work by taking care of a home and learning how to cook.

Among the scholars who visited Franken’s Jericho house was John Strugnell who was working on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. He asked Mohammed to come to Jerusalem and so for 1958–60 Mohammed worked for him there. During those years Mohammed regularly passed the Jerusalem School (now the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research) during his shopping rounds and when Strugnell left Jerusalem he suggested that Mohammed apply for a job there. At that time Marvin Pope was the school director (1959–60) and his wife took Mohammed in hand.

ACOR: A Home Away from Home

Give to the ACOR Annual Fund today to ensure that ACOR’s researchers and guests continue to enjoy a few of the comforts of home while living in Jordan. Through your support, ACOR will remain a place where scholars can enjoy Abu Ahmed’s home-cooked meals and feel at home in a safe, comfortable, and welcoming environment.

At the Jerusalem School he was the assistant to Omar Jibrin, the head chef, and during that time they served under several directors: Oleg Grabar (1960–61); Paul Lapp (1961–66); George Mendenhall (1965–66); and John Marks (1966–67). Those years in Jerusalem, which Abu Ahmed remembers as some of the best of his life, also saw him get married and start his own family. In 1961 Lapp invited Mohammed to cook for his dig team at Iraq al Amir, his first such experience. The following year he was recommended to serve as a chef for G.E. Wright’s Shechem (Tell Balatah) excavations. During this period Mohammed also worked as project cook at Tell er Rumeith, Tanaach, the Wadi ed Daliyeh Caves, and Bab ed Dhra.

In June 1967, Mohammed and his family left Jerusalem to stay in the home of an uncle in Jericho. Mohammed tried to get back to his own home in Jerusalem but he and hundreds of others were prevented from returning to the city and diverted to the other side of the Jordan River. He made his way to Zarqa on the northeast edge of Amman as he had relatives there. Eventually his mother received word as to where he was and the whole family arrived en masse. Most of them still live in Zarqa in homes that they have been able to build over the years.

For the rest of 1967, Mohammed managed to find a job in a coffee shop in downtown Amman, while some extra money came in from donations from old Jerusalem friends who had heard of his plight and sent small donations to help him and his family. In spring 1968 he was gainfully employed again as an assistant in the field as he worked for Crystal Bennett at Tawilan near Petra. Through the Department of Antiquities, he received a letter from Siegfried Horn engaging him as project cook for the Hesban dig. On the Hesban project,  Mohammed met many of the people he would see regularly at ACOR for the next three decades.

In 1968 Rudy Dornemann became the first annual professor director of ACOR and he hired Mohammed, who began work after the Hesban season. For a short time the Dornemanns lived in an apartment near the First Circle in Jabal Amman which is counted as ACOR’s first location. Mohammed recalls learning a lot from Mrs. Dorneman as well as Vivian Van Elderen, Sue Sauer, and Linda McCreery. Many of the recipes discussed with them are still enjoyed today! And as ACOR grew and expanded, first moving to the area of the Third Circle, then to the Fifth/Sixth Circle area in 1977, and then finally to its current location opposite the University of Jordan in 1986, Mohammed and his array of American classics and authentic Jordanian and Palestinian dishes helped make ACOR a home away from home for the countless fellows, guests, and visitors who passed through its doors.

The young man who caught the eye of Kathleen Kenyon in 1956 has met many archaeological figures over the decades and has countless stories to share. It has been my privilege to convey some of his personal story and acknowledge his major role in the success of ACOR. We benefit greatly from his cooking but also from his wisdom, his sensibility, and his amazing memory.

Adapted from Barbara A. Porter’s article “Mohammed Adawi Remembers,” in the Summer 2008 ACOR Newsletter (Vol. 20.1), special 40th anniversary issue.

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This story is adapted from the original article that appeared in the ACOR Newsletter, Winter 2013, Volume 25.2. To read the entire newsletter, or any of ACOR’s previous newsletters, please visit the ACOR website.

Naif Zaban, ACOR’s long-time conservation technician whose talents now support the ACOR Conservation Cooperative, first became involved with archaeology as a young man because he lived near the Amman Citadel. In 1988 he came to the attention of Mohammed Najjar, one of the co-directors of the joint expedition of the Department of Antiquities (DOA) and the École Biblique et Archéologique Française (EBAF) on the citadel, along with Fawzi Zayadine and Jean-Baptiste Humbert. Beginning in 1990, Najjar worked with the ACOR Temple of Hercules project funded by USAID, and Naif was part of the core technical team that Najjar assembled.

Naif was also an integral part of ACOR’s Petra Church ex­cavations which began in 1992. Robert Schick, a Petra Church co-director, and Naif were responsible for fixing up Nazzal’s camp in the basin area of Petra for the dig house before the excavations started. During the excavations, Naif remembers observing Tom Roby and Livia Alberti on site during the mosaic stabilization and conservation, and in the afternoon, Noël Siver conserving objects in Nazzal’s camp where Khairieh Amr was working on the pottery. Much of his learning was through careful observation. Zbig Fiema, another co-director of the Petra Church excavations, noted that Naif was a great help to him and was always very resourceful. Naif was a witness to the discovery of the Petra papyri in early December 1993. He recalls the moment when Hammoudi Nuweija said, “Stop! There is writing on them!”

Another project that Naif was involved in was at Humayma under the direction of John Oleson. He worked with conservator Judy Logan and archaeologist Rebecca Foote and was able to dem­onstrate his extraordinary skill when he restored several delicate Abbasid-period (8th century) ivory furniture panels, which will be on display in the Islamic section of the Jordan Museum. I was told that one person working on these minute ivory fragments did not think anything could be done but Naif persisted in his quiet methodical way and produced miracles—indeed virtually complete carved panels.

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Donate today to ACOR’s Annual Fund and support ACOR’s mission of preserving and conserving the objects, sites, and traditions of Jordan’s ancient past.
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Naif continued to work in the field in Petra with Patricia Bikai on the North Ridge project and due to the extensive amount of ceramic material uncovered, he started working continuously in 1998 in the ACOR lab to restore that pottery. Patricia Bikai commented that during her subsequent excavations in Bayda until 2007, Naif was her right-hand person and foreman. He also undertook various projects in that location including consolidating the grand walkway in the Amti Canyon.

In 2007, the ACOR Conservation Cooperative (ACC) was created, based on Naif’s talents, in order to help other projects in Jordan with their conservation needs. It seems appropriate that the first major endeavor for the ACC was to restore ceramic material from the 1988 Amman Citadel excavations. As part of the ACC, Naif was also secunded to the Jordan Museum for several major projects, during which time he worked closely with Fatma Marii, then head of conservation. At the Jordan Museum, Naif helped on many things, such as Byzantine mosaic floors and furnishings (i.e., pulpits, chancel screens, walls) and even completely new projects, such as early 20th century Hijaz railway cars and a railway track.

Most of his ACC efforts, however, take place in the ACOR Conserva­tion Lab, created with a grant from ASHA (American Schools and Hospitals Abroad) in the early 1990s and for which upgrades to the equipment are funded by ACOR’s USAID “Petra” Endow­ment. Since the start of the ACC, Naif has conserved material from more than three dozen projects and for several museums. Thanks to permissions granted by the Department of Antiquities, he has restored ceramic vessels of a wide range of periods and locations, i.e. Iron Age (Amman, Khirbet Ataruz, Khirbet Mudayna, Pella); classical periods including Nabataean and Roman (Humayma, Petra, Tall Abu Sarbut); and Islamic and medieval (Bayda, Pella, Khirbet Sheikh Issa, Tawaheen al Sukkar). Naif has also cleaned coins from a multitude of sites and this work will ultimately assist final excavation publications.

In recent years, he worked again at the Petra Church, helping with renewed conservation efforts at the site. Another past project recently revisited was the Byzantine Church at Darat Al Funun, the center which showcases art, archaeology, and architecture in Amman. During a brief period in summer 2012, Pierre Bikai and Naif returned, at the request of Suha Shoman, to place a capital on top of one of the church’s columns. Naif again undertook the stabilization of the remaining sections of the mosaic floor that he had consolidated during the excavations directed there by Pierre Bikai in 1993. From Darat Al Funun at the tip of Jabal Luweibda he could look across to the Amman Citadel where his unconventional and intriguing career started.

Written by Barbara A. Porter

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Phone ACOR on a given workday, sometimes even long after the office has officially closed, and the call will likely be picked up by a cheerful man who helps visiting fellows and scholars arrange airport taxis, book rooms, and extend their visas. Firas Bqa’in has been answering such calls since November, when he took over as the ACOR administrator. A printout of Firas’ official job description runs over three pages. Besides helping guests, which he does in Arabic, English, and Italian, Firas has numerous responsibilities including writing government letters, maintaining inventory, assisting with accounting, and generally helping things at ACOR run smoothly. One of Firas’ unique contributions to ACOR, however, has been his extraordinary display of kindness. “ACOR should be a service industry; we’re here for others, and [Firas] really understands that,” explained Dr. Barbara A. Porter, ACOR’s director. “When somebody walks in the door, he wants to help them and he really cares.” Kindness, in fact, is how Firas originally found the position. While working as the events administrator at the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) British Institute in Amman, Firas attended a lecture at ACOR and heard Barbara announce the job vacancy. Rather then instantly apply, his reaction was to wonder who he could inform about the opportunity. “I was thinking of a friend, I was thinking that she would be a very good candidate for this,” said Firas, “I told her and she [said], ‘But, why don’t you go there?’” For the first time, Firas considered applying for the position. He tentatively asked his colleagues at the CBRL, who overwhelmingly  approved. “They were like ‘you should go, you should apply for that!’” The final push, however, came Dr. Carol Palmer, director of the British Institute in Amman.  “She was very supportive,” said Firas. “If she wouldn’t like, encourage me to come, I wouldn’t come. But she was very supportive.”

Firas had been one of several candidates for the position, but ultimately was chosen for his academic background. With a master’s degree in archaeology, and experience doing fieldwork on Amman’s Citadel, Firas administers ACOR with full awareness of its challenges and aims. In the few months he has worked at ACOR, Barbara asserts that Firas’ interest in archaeology has made an enormous difference: “It makes our lives so much easier because he understands what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and why it matters. So, that really is an incredible feeling, getting support from somebody who gets it.”

The fact that Firas has outside interests also played a role in his hiring, as ACOR believes that well-rounded candidates are generally more effective and happier in a role that requires juggling so many different skill-sets. Before earning his master’s degree, Firas took six months to explore Italy;  “I wanted to learn the Italian language a little bit, and I wanted to do this experience of going outside [of Jordan], living with different people,” he said. Besides traveling and learning new languages, he has worked on cultivating artistic skills, namely photography and sculpture. Firas has spent the last few years working clay, and carving wood or stone, creating sinewy abstract figures or commanding faces. Finally, Firas’ biggest passion is in the form of devotion to his family. He proudly shows off many photos featuring his smiling wife, Rawan, though the real star seems to be his five-year-old son, Sanad, whose dark eyes and expressive face emit enough emotion to catch Firas off guard.

In addition to the duties of his position at ACOR, Firas has continued to pursue his academic interests, writing articles for academic journals and co-presenting a lecture on the archaeology of Early Islamic finds in Wadi Ramm.

Though similar to his job at CBRL, there are some differences in his position at ACOR. “It’s bigger volume, there’s a lot of people coming,” said Firas. “And there’s other people helping. But still, it’s much different. Accounting? I didn’t do much accounting, now I’m doing all of our accounting. And I’m happy, because I’m learning.”

Written by Sarah Oeffler

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Ahmad Hasanat isn’t one for making career choices based on movies.

“My main motivation wasn’t Indiana Jones,” he said, discussing his professional origin story over cups of fresh brewed tea, steaming against Petra’s cold January air. Instead, Hasanat’s reason for becoming an archaeologist was simple:  “I fell in love with this thing.”

Growing up amongst the ruins of an ancient society, Hasanat found himself wondering about the culture and religious practices of the Nabataeans who once inhabited Petra. His childhood fascination grew stronger as he grew older, pushing him to earn a degree in archaeology from Al Hussein Bin Talal University, and eventually to a job within Petra working for the Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management (TWLCRM) Initiative.

Though Hasanat was a local and experienced archaeologist, finding a job within Petra was not easy. He approached the TWLCRM because of the project’s reputation for hiring locally, and applied for work with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “Actually, I kept calling Chris for 15 times,” he said, laughing at the memory of his appeal to former project director Christopher Tuttle, now Executive Director of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

Hasanat says that most people who work in Petra probably have wealthy relatives or other advantages which helped them secure their jobs. Given this, he was thrilled when the TWLCRM Initiative hired him. “I was working in the site where I belonged,” he explained. “I feel I belong for the site, for Petra.”

Hasanat’s modesty hides keen talent and steady competence. Before his tenure at the TWLCRM, he worked with archaeologist Thomas Levy of the University of California, San Diego, and mastered complex computer and digital technologies that he subsequently used to support the work of the TWLCRM. Several animations of Hasanat’s three-dimensional computerized models of the temple’s architecture feature prominently on the TWLCRM Facebook page.

Though the TWLCRM Initiative allowed him to achieve his dream of working on an archaeological project within Petra, Hasanat found himself harboring a secret passion: photography. He began taking pictures of Petra with a small, low-resolution camera phone and quickly fell in love. But he knew he needed a real camera. “I came to Chris and asked him where to get a new camera,” remembered Hasanat, “I was interested to take photos for TWLCRM.” Tuttle told him to find out everything he could about camera brands, bodies, and lenses. So Hasanat searched, learning about the art of photography and how best to capture the beautiful but challenging Petra landscape. When Hasanat chose a camera and showed it to Tuttle on his laptop, Tuttle simply clicked “purchase” on the screen, buying a new camera for the project at Hasanat’s recommendation. “He just ordered that camera without any comment,” said Hasanat.

Tuttle’s decision was not a mistake. Hasanat’s photographs helped document both the work on site and the bright alien beauty of the surrounding landscape. His photography, in addition to receiving numerous “likes” on the TWLCRM Facebook page, earned him first place in the Archaeological Institute of America’s fieldwork photo contest in 2013. He currently showcases his work on his own website, Memories of Wadi Musa, where visitors can experience the remote but awesome beauty of Petra through his photographs.

Hasanat left the TWLCRM Initiative in 2013 to work as a Computer-Aided Design Engineer at the FalconVIZ project, funded by the the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and recently returned to Jordan to work for the Petra Archaeological Park as a photographer. He credits the TWLCRM with providing him with the training and skills that helped further his career and, in turn, the project applauds the many ways he contributed to the mission of the TWLCRM Initiative.

Written by Sarah Oeffler

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