JORDAN: ARCHAEOLOGY BEYOND DIGGING
Harpreet Birdi, 2018 MacAllister Excavation Fellowship Recipient
The author at the Rockefeller Museum.
I would like to begin by thanking ASOR and P.E. MacAllister for selecting me as the recipient of the MacAllister Excavation Fellowship. I must also thank all ASOR fellowship donors that helped me participate in an archaeological project. My journey to Jordan would not have been possible without the support of this fellowship. I am grateful for being given the opportunity to travel to Jordan for the second time to participate in the Town of Nebo Archaeological Project. I would also like to thank my professor, Dr Debra Foran, for inviting me to participate in the project again and assisting me with my directed study.
During this season of the project, I stayed in the city of Madaba where I worked alongside fellow students, graduates and PhD scholars from whom I learned a lot about pottery, faunal remains and remote sensing technology from. I was given the opportunity to complete a directed study which focuses on the community engagement and outreach program for our project. We called this the The Khirbet al-Mukhayyat Community Based
Town of Nebo Archaeological Project site at Khirbet-al Mukhayyat
Archaeological Program (KMCBAP). I spent a lot of my time conducting research, reaching out to locals and developing a plan for implementing community engagement within the Town of Nebo Archaeological Project. One of the primary focuses for this project was to determine the effectiveness of social media and developing a plan for maintaining public engagement. This project was inspired by methodologies of community-based programs from North America and Jordan. One of these projects from Jordan was the Madaba Plains Projects. Thanks to Dr Foran, I had the opportunity to attend the 50th anniversary conference of the Madaba Plains Project and visit the site of Tel-Hisban where I witnessed the community engagement for myself. I learned a lot about community engagement from this project and it was very inspiring to see the type of results and engagement we could bring to our own archaeological project.
Amman Citadel
To improve public and community engagement, I began by improving and updating all the websites and social media pages of our project. Additionally, I was constantly posting photographs and feeds about the 2018 season and the individual research projects that some students were conducting. The results were incredible because we gained the most amount of activity on our web pages than we ever have before! This helped us gain feedback about why our web pages were unpopular and what we were doing wrong. The social media platform is definitely a great place for archaeological projects to establish a relationship with the public and contemporary world. The importance of public archaeology and community engagement is often overlooked when it should be given more attention. To my surprise, many locals living in Madaba were unaware about our archaeological project, however, they all knew about the site and its history. Many people I spoke to were very intrigued about the site and wanted to visit or learn more about our archaeological project. I realized how ineffective our web pages were if locals were unaware of our project. After this season’s effort for increasing the popularity of the web pages, I hope we can soon begin to see a change and an improvement in community engagement.
The author with a goat herd.
Aside from working all day, I also had the chance to travel around Jordan to visit other archaeological sites and enjoy the natural landscapes of Jordan. My fellow colleges and I visited many sites including the Burnt Palace, Martyrs Church, Amman Citadel, Jerash, Umm ar-Rassas, Mount Nebo Memorial Site of Moses and the Dead Sea. We also took a trip to Israel for a few days where we stayed in Jerusalem. We visited the Temple Mount with the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, Rockefeller Museum and Israel Museum. Additionally, my birthday happened to be while I was in Jordan which we celebrated at a restaurant inside a 65 million years old cave! It was a very interesting experience and we all had a great night. All the travelling and sightseeing really made all the hard work worth it!
This season was a great learning experience for me and I gained so much knowledge about the different types of research projects archaeologists conduct outside the field. I had a great time meeting new people from our project, other archaeological projects in Jordan and from countless countries across the globe. It was great to be able to return to Jordan again and I would once again like to extend my gratitude to ASOR and P.E. MacAllister for giving me this wonderful opportunity.
Links for the Town of Nebo Archaeological Project:
Website: http://www.townofneboproject.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/townofneboarchaeologicalproject/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/neboarchaeology
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/townofnebo/
Harpreet Birdi is a recent graduate from Wilfrid Laurier University who just completed her undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Heritage Studies with a subfield in Osteology and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. This is her second trip to Jordan where she participated in the Town of Nebo Archaeological Project. Harpreet currently lives in Ontario, Canada where she works as an archaeological field technician.
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