ACOR Staff and Affiliates at the ASOR Annual Meeting:
Presentations, Honors, and Updates
From Nov. 21–23, 2019, the ASOR Annual Meeting (ASOR: The American Schools of Oriental Research) took place in San Diego, CA, and dozens of current and former ACOR affiliates contributed to the event. This includes:
- ACOR Associate Director John (Jack) Green presented his paper, “An Archaeologist in Context: Insights from the Letters and Photographs of Olga Tufnell” for the session “History of Archaeology.”
- ACOR Travel Award recipients Sahar al Khaswneh of Yarmouk University and Mohammad Al Azaizeh of the University of Jordan, Aqaba also traveled to the U.S. to attend. Dr. Khaswneh presented a paper titled “Luminescence Dating of a Transitional Chalcolithic/Bronze Age Site in Jordan,” co-authored with Andrew Murray and Lutif Khalil and participated in the panel “Technology in Archaeology: Recent Work in the Archaeological Sciences.” Mohammad Al Azaizeh spoke on “Preservation vs. Use: Comparing Tourism Stakeholder Value Perceptions toward Petra.”
- ACOR Board President Randolph B. Old was honored with the W.F. Albright Service award for his decades of support for ACOR. Mr. Old has served on the ACOR Board since 1990 and in the roles of Treasurer from 1992-2011 and President from 2011-2019. To read more about this achievement, please see here.
- USAID-SCHEP Chief of Party Nizar Al Adarbeh and Deputy Chief of Party Jehad Haron participated in several presentations, discussions, and workshops. They served as discussants at a workshop on “Preserving the Cultural Heritage of the Madaba Region of Jordan” alongside the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP). Mr. Adarbeh gave a presentation on the USAID-SCHEP model for community engagement, and co-presented with Mohammad El Khalili (Hashemite University) on “Cultural Heritage as a Driver for Economic Growth through Participatory, Community-Based Tourism: The Case of Matan Heritage Village in Jordan.” Mr. Haron, who is also SCHEP’s CHR Lead, presented with Ahmad Lash (Jordanian Department of Antiquities) on the “Bayt Ras Tomb: A New Discovery in North Jordan” for a panel on the Archaeology of Jordan. Al Adarbeh, Haron, and Green also all participated in a Getty Conservation Institute-and ASOR-organized “Conservation and Archaeology” workshop on the final day of the conference.
- ACOR Board Members Drs. Megan Perry, Morag Kersel, Bert de Vries, Øystein LaBianca, John P. Oleson, S. Thomas Parker, Jennifer Ramsay, and Bethany Walker also presented at the conference (titles and abstracts here).
- Recent ACOR Fellows who presented at the conference included Craig Harvey, Amy Karoll, and Ian Jones.
- Lastly, ACOR Newsletter 31.1 author and longtime ACOR supporter Dr. Gary Rollefson participated in a panel on “Late Neolithic Buildings at Wisad Pools, Jordan.”
All conference abstracts can be read at the following link: bit.ly/asor2019
On behalf of everyone at ACOR, thank you to the conference organizers, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), and to everyone who made participating in this event such an educational and enjoyable experience!
