My study abroad experiences in Jordan was an intensive Arabic language study program. I was constantly immersed in the language by living in the culture and speaking with my homestay family throughout the day. My Arabic progressed the most during my Arabic classes that I would have for twenty-five hours per week. The fast pace of the program allowed for me to advance a semesters worth of Arabic within two months.

My professor was a kind and patient Jordanian man who made the class very challenging, yet I left everyday inspired to keep studying and learning more. I was supported by all of the language professors and grew in my skills from all of their help and patience. My class specifically was the advanced class where we focused a great deal on fluency in speaking and comprehension as well as grammar. In addition to studying Modern Standard Arabic, my class spent an hour a day learning the colloquial language in Jordan.

                                        Roman Citadel in Amman

My program went on excursions to practice our Arabic in real world experiences and to push us out of our comfort zones. We had to complete a scavenger hunt in the downtown of Amman, we visited the Baptism Site of Jesus, the dead sea, Jerash (which is the most preserved Roman city in the world), Petra, the Red Sea and Wadi Rum. We were required to complete essays after each experience and be able to speak about it fluently. We were also required to speak the language throughout each excursion.

                                         Learning traditional cooking with a Bedouin woman

I feel so blessed and grateful to have learned so much from a language and culture that I am extremely passionate about. I will use this experience to aid in my greater study of the Arabic language. I also am keeping in touch with my homestay family and friends from Jordan to constantly practice.

Throughout my two months abroad in Jordan, I lived with a homestay family for the entirety of my experience. When I first arrived in the country, I came as Jacqueline Bengtson, and I left feeling as though I was a true member of the family, as if I were Jacqueline Jawdat Abukar. My immense extended homestay family welcomed me into their lives with so much grace. Everyday my family treated me as if I were their daughter, sister, cousin, granddaughter or niece.

My Arabic skills and confidence in speaking grew immensely by using the language constantly with my family and friends. My family members would graciously help me with any of my assignments or questions. I took each speaking opportunity as a way to learn more; I would write down new words and phrases that I would learn in conversations to study and practice later.

                     My homestay family

By living and learning from my family, not only did my Arabic get better but I grew a greater understanding and appreciation for the Arab culture. My homestay mother would make me delicious traditional meals and my family took me multiple times to a large park where hundreds of families would congregate to cook food and eat a traditional barbeque. I was a guest at two very traditional weddings with traditional food, music and attire. I was humbled by my homestay grandmother’s kindness and generosity as every Friday she would take me to the mosque to pray in a hijab and prayer dress. I learned and memorized chapters from the Quran to utter during prayer and I also learned how to pray in a service.

My homestay family and I at one of the two weddings I attended

Every night my extended family would congregate on the patio of our apartment and drink tea and share the stories of our day. I was treated just the same while being pulled away at times by my little brother and sisters to play. I cherish each experience I had with my family and hold them deep in my heart in hopes that I will be able to embrace each of them again someday.

Blog 3: Return

As stressful as it always is traveling from Vescovado di Murlo to Rome for my flight home, I end up enjoying the opportunity to sit and wait an hour for my connecting train. I am traveling alone so while I have one eye on all my bags, I am also watching the local Italians sit at the platform across from me. As an Anthropology major who spent her entire summer working with Classicists and talking about Italian history, I love spending the last few days here studying the Italian culture of today. I have picked up a little Italian during my stay but I have yet to become anywhere close to fluent. There are several couples sitting with me and I am reminded of the difference between the United States and Italy regarding public displays of affection.

Leaving the Roma Airport

I already miss being on site, covered in dirt and sweat, discovering artifacts, and recording them. I loved the work I did this summer and I loved being able to teach others about it. I have already told the site director that I plan on returning next summer and that I am excited to catch up with them at archaeological conferences throughout the year. We plan on talking about my future graduate school plans and how to best prepare myself for the application process. I am confident that my summer at the Poggio Civitate Archaeological site working as a trenchmaster will look fantastic on my resume and that it will exponentially raise my chances of getting into a fantastic graduate program.

Blog 2: During

This summer is proving to be quite the challenge, but I’ve been thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. My experience here has only proven to me that I belong in Academia, teaching other college-level students. My nerves are sure to be shot due to the fact that I have never been in a staff position on an archaeological dig where I am given my own area of excavation to run completely on my own. I have been spending my days working on site, throwing a pick pass into the ground and sifting through artifacts from 7am to 3pm. After working on-site, I head to the lab with the other staff members to drop off my finds from the day which typically include pottery and bone.

Working in the Field

At the end of the day, we have paperwork and documentation from the day’s work to catch up on. I have been given a trenchbook to write my daily finds in which has to be a direct narrative of what happens in my trench every day. I’ve learned so far how best to instruct first year students on how to recognize specific artifacts on site. I have already learned so much about documentation and teaching and I am excited to see what the rest of the season will look like.

Blog 1: Pre-Departure

This summer will be my third time attending the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Field School. This year, I will be a trenchmaster and I will be given a trench to excavate using the skills I learned last summer as a trenchmaster in training. This summer I will have the opportunity to lead first year students in on site excavation techniques and Etruscan history. I will be able to run my own area of excavation and at the end of the season, I will have a trenchbook with my name on it. This means that which contains evidence that I know how to run my own area of excavation, that I know how to properly document events and artifacts on site and in the lab.

Arriving

I’m both excited and nervous for this summer. I am excited to return to a dig that I am familiar with where I am prepared to become a full staff member and teach first years about Etruscans. I am nervous because I have never been in a staff position where the people I am training are the same age and career level as I am. While there are a few incoming freshman and a few sophomores, most of the first year students will be rising seniors like me or will have just graduated from college. Despite my nerves, I am more than excited to return to Poggio Civitate and continue my archaeological training.

Besides visiting the official exhibition venues of the Venice Biennale, I also attended numerous affiliated events and exhibitions in Venice. One of these—Authentic Human Bodies: Leonardo da Vinci—exhibited actual human corpses preserved through the process of plastination and arranged after selected anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Controversial and somewhat disturbing, this exhibition was definitely unforgettable.

Other things that I participated in included tours of historic churches in Venice and a visit to the offices of Save Venice, a nonprofit organization that hires professional conservators and restoration staff in order to halt and reverse degradation to the cultural treasures of Venice. Separately, I visited Teatro la Fenice, an opera house in Venice, where Save Venice had worked on the ceiling molding after the building fell victim to arson in 1996. Although Save Venice works primarily in the realm of historic preservation, and I am interested in the preservation of contemporary art, it was still extremely interesting for me to visit the Save Venice offices and see an example of the work they have accomplished firsthand.

The experience of visiting the Biennale, in addition to assisting with my Student-Faculty Collaborative Scholarship project, provided me with numerous opportunities to view breaking contemporary artists from across the globe. Additionally, this experience introduced me to the network of professional conservators at Save Venice, something that I am extremely thankful for.

Over the summer, I traveled to Venice, Italy, where I attended the Venice Biennale—a global contemporary arts collective that meets once every two years—as a part of my Student-Faculty Collaborative Research project with Dr. Susan Libby in the Department of Art and Art History. Our project probes the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art in an effort to use these contemporary art objects as case studies illustrating the multiple issues that arise in the preservation of contemporary cultural heritage. Thus, visiting the Venice Biennale, with its numerous contemporary artists employing a wide variety of media, greatly assisted me in understanding issues of collection care for contemporary art collections.

While I was in Venice, I visited the two exhibition venues of the Biennale—the Giardini and the Arsenale—and attended the curated exhibitions there. The theme of the curated exhibitions this year, May You Live In Interesting Times, dealt with the concept of holding two seemingly dichotomous ideas in the mind simultaneously. Perhaps the most jarring artwork was Christian Marclay’s 48 War Movies (2019), where 48 video files were projected in overlapping, concentric boxes with volume blaring. Due to the violent nature of the movies, the sound was a deafening mix of explosions and gunshots. The didactic for the installation stated that because the video files are each a different length, and because they are all looped continuously, the artwork can essentially broadcast forever without repeating.

Additionally, at each venue, numerous participating countries host pavilions where they display contemporary art by their own artists. Visiting each of these pavilions helped me become more familiar with the big names of international contemporary art scene, something that will surely be valuable as I pursue a career in contemporary art conservation.

This summer I spent five weeks in a town called Vescovado di Murlo in the Province in Siena, Italy, digging at the Etruscan archaeological site of Poggio Civitate. The field school, run through the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and headed by Dr. Anthony Tuck, was inarguably one of the most extraordinary experiences of my college career thus far. I’ve known I want to be an archaeologist for years but haven’t decided what particular area I want to spend my professional career in; there are quite a few to choose from. Working on this site this summer forced me to seriously think about which direction I wanted to take when it comes to my academic and professional career. I learned different archaeological techniques along with various conservation methods. Every morning from Monday through Friday, we were up before 6 am, eating breakfast on the stoop, hiking up the hill, and were ready to start digging by 7 am. We worked from then until 3:30 in the afternoon stopping only for personal salt and water breaks and the group lunch at noon which lasted a half hour. It was hard work and most of the time was spent either squatting in the trench or standing, bent at the waist. Every week, students were put into groups of about five or six and assigned to a specific trench working under a different trench-master. This worked wonderfully because every supervisor ran their trench a little differently and every trench contained different and various artifacts so students were constantly learning new things throughout the summer. I came back home battered and bruised and had to ice my knees for three days straight but I could not have been happier with how I spent my summer. I look forward to returning to Poggio Civitate as a trench-master in training next summer.