a Geographer's Place

While conducting research in your home region can be tricky, conducting research in another country, while always tricky, can also be...complicated. Proposals to write, permissions to get, paperwork to complete...and it continues. This day began with a meeting at the Department of Antiquities to solidify research agendas. The support and interest is apparent, but the paperwork and waiting. Ugh. Lots of it. The good news? This allows plenty of time for fieldwork planning. The joys of fieldwork. After the morning meeting with the DOA, we headed out to the Citadel. I’ve written about it previously , and not going to repeat myself here, so there aren ’t any  pictures for this short blog. On this visit, however, we were able to visit the museum. Although the interpretive plaques are a bit yellowed and old, they still convey pertinent information and the museum’s layout and artifacts are crazy neat! And once you’ve seen pretty much all the places where those artifacts are from, it...

The last several days we have been exploring potential research sites in Amman itself in case we aren’t able to get to our intended research sites. And Amman has plenty to explore! Just look at the view from The Citadel: Looking southeast over Amman from Jabal al Qal'a , as it's called in Arabic The Citadel has a temple dedicated to Heracles (Hercules to Westerners), a Byzantine church, and an Umayyad palace. If you want more, the Wikipedia entry is good, although their first picture of “Amman Citadel Ruins” is NOT from the Citadel, but rather the city of Jerash (this is why ground-truthing is so important!) The large pillars represent what is thought to be the entrance into the Temple of Hercules. Apparently there was also a very large statue of him - they have the hand and elbow on display, just sitting out in the elements. The small-ish box-like structures in the foreground are (empty) sarcophogi. Notice the sprawl of Amman in the background. In a nut shel...