Nancy L. Lapp - Böcker

Tell er-Rumeith lies at the eastern edge of the Irbid plain in northern Jordan not far from the Syria border and the present town of Ramtha.  The publication presents the most complete corpus of Iron Age pottery for this area and its occupation reflects the Biblical traditions of the region.  Tristan Barako and the other authors have used the field notes, reports and photographs of Paul Lapp's excavations in the 1960s to bring together this final report.  In Part I of the volume, Barako presents the basic stratigraphy of the site and the corpus of Iron Age pottery that represents its main period of occupation.  Part II presents studies of artifacts by a variety of authors, including the post-Iron age pottery, noteworthy presentations of the community health (the human skeleton evidence) and textile production at the site, as well as fascinating collections of figurines, groundstone and other small finds. Illustrated with 207 b&w illustrations and 38 tables.

This book, edited by Nancy L. Lapp and with contributions by Michael S. Zimmerman, Daniel Ulvoczky, Nicholas Hudson and Adam Hartman, is the second volume of reports from Paul Lapp's excavations at 'Iraq al-Amir in 1961 and 1962. The first appeared as the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research Vol. 47, in 1983.The presentation by Michael S. Zimmerman of the stratified corpus of the Hellenistic and Roman pottery in the Village excavations, from approximately 200 BCE to 200 CE, is a major portion of the volume. Along with the smaller pottery collections of the Iron Age, Early Bronze, and Byzantine periods, a major contribution is made to the growing quantity of characteristic pottery of Transjordan and its relation to the ceramic assemblages of ancient Palestine to the west and Syria to the north.Although early Iron Age pottery is present in the collection, the main Iron Age occupation was later in the period, even into early Persian times, and it is doubtful that there was an Iron I fortress there as Paul Lapp suggested. The pottery studies are introduced by a review of the history of the excavations at the site from the time of the early explorers and, further, by an introduction describing camp and excavation life in an area not yet touched by modern conveniences in the middle of the twentieth century.