Crystal Bennett and the 1965 American Embassy Medain Saleh Expedition in Saudi Arabia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

British archaeologist Crystal Bennett (1918–1987) is considered one of the formidable British female archaeologists of the Middle East, conducting investigations across Jordan and beyond from 1957 to 1983. As Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s student at the University of London in the early 1950s, she was introduced to Biblical archaeology during the Jericho project in northern Jordan. After Jericho, Bennett joined the Jerusalem British School of Archaeology’s (BSAJ) Petra excavation and began her career as a classical Middle Eastern archaeologist focused on the Biblical nations of Edom and Nabataea. In 1965, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia accompanied by Bennett led an expedition to the Nabataean site of Medain Saleh in Saudi Arabia. It was the first modern archaeological assessment of Medain Saleh, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1970, Bennett became the director of the BSAJ and began her work at Busayra, the main administrative and religious center of Edom. She established the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History in 1975; she became its first formal director in 1978. Crystal Bennett fundamentally advanced Jordanian archaeology using scientific methods and received an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for this work. This paper focuses on the Medain Saleh expedition.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33015