Bert de Vries at Umm el-Jimal, Jordan. Image source: Darrell J. Rohl Our department mourns the sudden passing on March 28, 2021 of Professor Emeritus Bert de Vries, our deeply beloved and longest-serving colleague. A Calvin alumnus (’60), Bert returned to Calvin in 1967, after graduate study at Calvin Seminary and Brandeis University, and taught …
Continue reading Remembering Bert de Vries
by Frans van Liere. In my last entry for Historical Horizons, I wrote about how archaeology can be a tool for colonialism. For the Palestinian inhabitants of the village of Silwan, the Israeli archaeological park of the “City of David,” situated right in their West Bank village, bears a clear message: you don’t belong here; …
Continue reading Building Community among the Ruins
by Frans van Liere. More than any history book, archaeology can create a powerful sense of the past. At the same time, just like history, archaeology can be used and abused for political purposes. It can create a sense of national or ethnic identity, or exclude others from that identity. This past summer, when my …
Continue reading Hezekiah’s Tunnel and the City of David
by Amanda Armour Greenhoe (Excerpt from an article in the Fall 2015 edition of Spark) You’re surfing the internet when you find an article on the Italian Grand Prix, a tale of fast cars at dangerously fast speeds. This story of the race’s 1928 running, written in 2015 with the advantages of hindsight and historical context, …
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By Bert de Vries. A Retrospective of the presentation made in Session 1D at ASOR's 2014 Annual Meetings in San Diego. In 2007 the Umm el-Jimal Project (UJP) made a thematic shift away from stress on academic archaeological research to site management with twin foci, preservation and community engagement. Site preservation on the ground was …
Continue reading Preservation and Community Engagement at Umm el-Jimal in 2014
by Will Katerberg Prior to this class, history courses annoyed me because I always thought, ‘History is history, it happened and it’s over with, that’s that.’ This is true: history is in the past and you can’t change the past. But depending on how you approach history or what method you use to approach it, …
Continue reading What My Students (and I) Learned This Semester
Historical Horizons 