News & Views

  • 16 February 2023·

The Petra Hinterland Social Landscapes Project. Launch of First Season in 2022

By Will M. Kennedy After some considerable delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first field season of the Petra Hinterland Social Landscapes Project (PHSLP) was finally realized in June/ July 2022.  It is assumed that Nabataean Petra was greatly impacted by a social structure that was rooted in family, clan or tribal traditions. While such socio-political aspects of Nabataean culture have already been extensively explored in urban Petra, investigations of similar aspects in the city’s hinterland are only beginning to gain wider scholarly attention. However, important archaeological sites may be identified in the Petraean hinterland as possible archaeological markers of distinct social landscapes in Petra’s surroundings. These include specific cultic sites such as rural sanctuaries or isolated cultic installations,…
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  • 16 February 2023·

Spadeologists: Australians and the Shellal Mosaic

By James Donaldson The Shellal mosaic is the floor of a 6th century church removed from high ground north of Wadi Ghuzze at Shellal by Australians in 1917. The main portion of the floor is displayed at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra after being claimed as a “war trophy” by Australia. Sources relating to its removal are held by museums, archives, churches and private collections in both Australia and New Zealand. This blog is based on preliminary research into the history of the Shellal mosaic funded by the Palestine Exploration Funds’ annual research grant scheme in 2022. It explores the kinds of tools and implements used by Australians to uncover the Shellal mosaic, and in other encounters with antiquities…
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  • 19 November 2022·

Investigating changing socio-economic landscapes in the Early Bronze Age Levant through Zooarchaeology

By Gwendoline Maurer & Mariana Albuquerque UCL Institute of Archaeology. Back in February 2022, we received the great news in our inbox that The Palestine Exploration Fund had awarded us funding to travel to Haifa to carry out zooarchaeological research related to the Early Bronze Age of the Levant. By May 2022, we were once again back in Israel and found ourselves at the University of Haifa. There, we were warmly welcomed by Dr. Nimrod Marom, and his team, at the Laboratory for Mediterranean Archaeology (MAR). Their impressive reference collection was invaluable to our work. Surrounded by skeletons of Persian gazelles, ibex, jackals, wolves, and fallow deer, among others, we felt right at home. Fig. 1 – University of Haifa…
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  • 19 November 2022·

‘‘Sacred Landscapes’’: the Umayyad Syro-Jordanian Hajj Roads to Mecca and their Pilgrim Camps

By Claudine Dauphin. 8th May 2022: after two Covid years I am back in Amman to investigate the Umayyad Hajj road to Mecca, after tracing the Mediaeval and Ottoman routes. Despite the fundamental role of the Ummayyad caliphs (661-750 CE) in shaping the Hajj, owing to the absence of Umayyad travelogues, the course of the first Hajj route after the Arab Conquest (636 CE) had remained elusive. Scholars took for granted that it was identical to the later Mediaeval road. Yet, as described in an early Islamic manuscript, Caliph Mu’âwiya ibn Abî Sufyan (r. 661-680) travelling on the Northern Hajj Road (Darb al-Hajj al-Shami) from Damascus to Mecca, invited the pilgrims from Egypt to join him at ‘Ayla (Aqaba) and follow…
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  • 15 November 2022·

PEF event: “The Oddest Archaeologists to Visit Jerusalem.” The story of the notorious Parker expedition and the search for the Temple treasures.

Tuesday 15th November 2022 6pm The mystery surrounding the Ark of the Covenant’s location is one of the world’s greatest and most enduring. Of the quests to find the Ark, perhaps the most remarkable is the Parker expedition. Its story seems stranger than fiction and includes aristocrats, poets, psychics, secret cyphers in the Bible, a deadly curse, bribery, gun running, riots, and madness.  Previously untold in its entirety, Graham Addison has uncovered many new details, which he skilfully weaves together in the amazing story of the individuals who in 1909 sailed on a private yacht bound for Jerusalem to retrieve the Ark. Find out more here
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  • 11 October 2022·

Researching Palestinian psychiatric patients at the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases

By Chris Sandal-Wilson. Back in March 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic escalating and the first national lockdown beginning in the United Kingdom, a rare piece of good news brightened my inbox: the Palestine Exploration Fund had awarded me funding to travel to Beirut to research the history of Palestinian psychiatric patients at the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases in the first half of the twentieth century. In researching my first book on colonial psychiatry and mental illness in British mandate Palestine, I had been struck by the number of Palestinian families who seemed to look north across the newly drawn border to Lebanon for the treatment of mentally ill relatives. I was excited at the prospect of using the archives…
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  • 11 October 2022·

Overlooked Archaeologists of Palestine

By Loay Abu Alsaud. Our endeavour was to bring to light early contributions made to archaeology in Palestine by key Palestinians who have been overlooked by researchers. The first foreign scientific excavations took place in Palestine in the late 19th century and by the 1920s, European and American teams were arriving in Palestine, attempting to link archaeological sites to Biblical passages. They needed support personnel and recruited Palestinian men and women. Of note were three Palestinians, who became proficient at complex, skilled work and were given key onsite responsibilities, influencing the progress of archaeology in Palestine. They were Yusra (Turn 20th C–Unknown) whose surname is unknown (Al-Ḥefaweyeh or Al-Karmelyeh may be seen). Naṣr Dyab Dwekat (1917–2011) and Ibrahim Amin Asa’d…
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  • 29 September 2022·

PEF event: The Inheritance of Christ: Christian Pilgrimage in the Holy Land Before the Crusades, c.800 – c.1099

Thursday 13th October 2022 6pm Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early Islamic period has received comparatively less attention than the Roman and Crusading periods in recent scholarship. Drawing upon a range of material, from excavations and graffiti, to sources in Arabic, Greek, and Latin, this talk will examine the complexity and texture of the pilgrim experience from the rise of Abbasids to the coming of the Crusades. Find out more here.
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  • 29 September 2022·

The 2022 survey at Khirbet al-Mudayna al-‘Aliya, Jordan

Diederik J. H. Halbertsma, University of Liverpool, Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egpytology. In May 2022 we conducted a survey season at the archaeological site of Khirbet al-Mudayna al-‘Aliya (KMA for short), south-central Jordan, with a small team. The site is located in the eastern part the Kerak plateau, on a promontory overlooking the Wadi al-Mukhayris. KMA is a 2.3 ha. single-period site which dates to the end of the early Iron Age period. The early Iron Age followed a cataclysmic time commonly known as the ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ (ca. 1200 BCE), which saw the demise of great empires. The Levant, which had largely been governed by the Hittites and the Egyptians, suddenly found itself in a power vacuum.…
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  • 29 September 2022·

The Palestine Exploration Fund/Albright Institute Fellowship 2023-24

We are pleased to announce applications are open for the Palestine Exploration Fund/Albright Institute Fellowship 2023/4. This is an annual award of £3,000 to support research that requires access to the PEF archives and collection and also time spent in residence at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem. The Fellowship requires a minimum of 10 working days at the PEF in Greenwich, London, and a 1 month minimum stay at AIAR in Jerusalem. The room and half-board at the Institute ($1,200 per month) will come from the award, with the rest a flexible stipend for the other activities. This Fellowship is open to doctoral and post-doctoral researchers of all nationalities. This Fellowship is for a residential period between September and the…
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