Friday, March 9, 2012

The Basel group, consisting of Laurent Gorgerat, Christoph Schneider and Andreas Voegelin, arrived a couple of days ago in Amman in order to prepare everything for our 2012 field campaigns. After a first visit to the Department of Antiquities on Thursday, Friday was devoted to do the first shopping tour in various malls in Amman. After a few hours of intense shopping the pickup truck presented itself densely packed.

Fig. 1: Masterly packed pickup truck in front of IFPO Amman.
Fig. 1: Masterly packed pickup truck in front of IFPO Amman.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Today, the Berlin group of our 2012 archaeological Petra activities takes off ground. Nine persons (Polly Agoridou, Nadine Bürkle, Jana Falkenberg, Sebastian Hoffmann, Thomas Kabs, Lydia Kappa, Will Kennedy, Jan Reimann and Stephan Schmid) leave for Amman with the newly (2011) installed direct flight by Royal Jordanian.

Fig 2: Polly Agoridou, Nadine Bürkle and Jana Falkenberg (from left) enjoying their flight.
Fig 2: Polly Agoridou, Nadine Bürkle and Jana Falkenberg (from left) enjoying their flight.

There, or rather in Petra, we are supposed to meet the Basel group consisting of Laurent Gorgerat, Christoph Schneider and Andreas Voegelin as well as Wiltrud and Robert Wenning from Münster. All of them arrived a few days earlier in order to get started with administrative purposes.

Fig. 3: Will Kennedy (left), after a short night, obliged to listen to boring stories by Stephan Schmid (right).
Fig. 3: Will Kennedy (left), after a short night, obliged to listen to boring stories by Stephan Schmid (right).

Yes, you counted correctly, André Barmasse, long time pillar and/or cornerstone of many archaeological projects at Petra is not participating this year. Although everybody is very sad about this, we know his spirit with us and especially we know that he takes care about the weblog of our activities in the usual professional manner. Next year, insh’allah, André will be part of the team again.

Fig. 4: Everybody is happy to be back to Jordan.
Fig. 3: Everybody is happy to be back to Jordan.