I have served nearly 5 years as President of ASOR. Much of the past year, since October 7th, has been taken up in discussions about statements: should ASOR as an organization say something, anything, about current political events, most urgently the war in Gaza? As a group dedicated to the study of the past from multiple viewpoints, we have elected for the most part (See ASOR’s single statement of Oct. 16th, 2023, behind which I still stand.) to remain silent. We are not as an organization taking sides. This has the dubious advantage of pleasing no one.  Despite its disadvantages, I share the consensus of ASOR’s leadership—my fellow Officers, Executive Committee, and Board of Trustees—that this is the best path for an organization that seeks to provide a welcoming forum where all our members feel free to express their opinions.

Today, I write my own thoughts as one archaeologist who has spent a long career documenting the past in Greece, Israel, and Egypt, and who has been entrusted with the leadership of ASOR by you, its members.

Archaeologists love disasters. Perversely, destruction preserves. Fire bakes unfired clay into nearly indestructible ceramic. Paper documents are turned to ash; stones and pots bear silent witness to people forever lost. In our more macabre moments we archaeologists joke that we love nothing more than a good earthquake or volcanic eruption. We are the ambulance chasers of antiquity, examining, some would say desecrating, the dead in the name of science. We train ourselves to be dispassionate spectators, but of course that is impossible. Each of us, based on our own upbringing, background and experience, reacts viscerally to past and present acts of destruction and loss of life.

ASOR’s core mission is the preservation and study of antiquities in the Near East and wider Mediterranean. We cannot study what war has irrevocably destroyed. Today we face a war in Gaza that scholars estimate has damaged or destroyed at least 57% of all buildings in the territory—the Great Omari Mosque, Saint Porphyrios Greek Orthodox Church, and Pasha Museum in Gaza City to name only three that touch directly on ASOR’s fields of study. In recent years we have seen the destruction of countless sites in Syria and Iraq—the vast Hellenistic city of Dura-Europos reduced to looters’ potholes, much of Palmyra, rubble, countless lives lost and many others crippled.

I ask myself, we all ask ourselves, what can ASOR do in the face of such destruction? Never enough. Beyond our core mission to initiate, encourage, and support research into, and public understanding of the history and cultures of the Near East we are striving to do what we can, where we can, when we can to help our colleagues in need. We pick up the pieces after disasters with our Shepherd Urgent Action Grants. We raise funds to help displaced students continue their educations, we work with local citizens to document and publish their pasts and present efforts to preserve them using open access computer programs. These are only a few of the things we are doing today as we strive to document and save the monuments of past peoples. It can never be enough; no number of monuments can compensate for even a single life lost; but with the help of our members we persevere—one day, one memory at a time.

I am proud to be a member of ASOR even in these dark times. I hope you are as well. I would welcome thoughts from you, our members, on more ways we can act positively in this troubled region.

Sharon Herbert
ASOR President
president@asor.org