Humayma Excavation Project, 2 ― Nabatean Campground and Necropolis, Byzantine Churches, and Early Islamic Domestic Structures

John Peter Oleson, an archaeologist and Classics scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada, where he has taught since 1976. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Board member of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member of Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He was appointed a Killam Research Fellow for 2000-2002. In 2010 he was awarded the Pierre Chauveau Medal by the Royal Society of Canada for his "distinguished contribution to knowledge in the humanities." Professor Oleson's research focuses on the Roman Near East and ancient technology, particularly ships, harbours, and water-supply systems. He has directed or participated in underwater excavations at a number of Roman harbour sites in Italy and Israel, and between 1986 and 2008 he directed excavations at the site of Humayma, ancient Hawara, an imperial Roman fort in Jordan's southern desert. The first volume of the final report on these excavations appeared in 2010: Humayma Excavation Project, 1: Resources, History, and the Water-Supply System (Boston 2010). He has broad experience in surveying remains of ancient technical installations, particularly hydraulic structures. He has published 12 books and more than 95 articles concerning ancient technology, marine archaeology, the Nabataeans, and the Roman Near East. His recent book, The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (New York 2008) in 2009 was awarded the Eugene S. Ferguson Prize by the Society for the History of Technology as the best contribution to the field in the previous two years. Robert Schick is an archaeologist and historian active in Jordan since 1980. He has focused his efforts on the Byzantine and Islamic periods and especially on the Christian communities during the Byzantine to Early Islamic transitional period. In addition to the churches at Humayma, he has excavated other early Christian churches at el-Lejjun, Umm al-Jimal, al-Quwaysmah and elsewhere in Jordan. He is currently a research fellow at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, writing the report of an old excavation of the Byzantine and Early Islamic remains in the Madaba Archaeological Park. Dr. Schick has also worked in Jerusalem, where he taught archaeology courses at al-Quds University and Bir Zeit University in the mid-1990s and he has been studying the Islamic sites and monuments of the city and the holdings of the Islamic Museum on the Haram al-Sharif. He also taught in India in the early 2000s and is at present directing a survey of archaeological sites on the east coast of Andhra Pradesh.