In Memoriam: Donald S. Whitcomb

Donald Whitcomb, a member of this journal’s editorial board since its founding, passed away on February 8, 2024, at the age of seventy-nine. His absence is deeply felt by the archaeological community and those who knew him personally. Don was a pioneer in and founder of the field of Islamic archaeology and a scholar of Early Islamic urban history. He was part of the University of Chicago community for over four decades as a research associate professor at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC)—formerly the Oriental Institute—and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC).Like many of us currently in the field, Don’s career did not begin with archaeology but began with an undergraduate degree in art history, followed by time in the 1960s in the Peace Corps in Iran. This sparked his interest in the Middle East and led him to his future career, first receiving his PhD in Islamic archaeology in the Department of Anthropology (perhaps the first) at the University of Chicago. His initial archaeological fieldwork was in Iran, and later, in 1978, he moved with his wife, Janet Johnson, to a joint Oriental Institute project on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. With this project, he began his career at the University of Chicago.Additional projects in Egypt and a return to sites in Iran and the Persian Gulf fostered his interest in urban history, which blended in an interdisciplinary way his training as an art historian with his formulation of the principles of Islamic archaeology. His work in Iran in the early 1980s reflected the “incorporated studies of material culture . . . with cultural context and textual evidence” (Eger 2024: 3), setting his scholarship apart from others in the new discipline. In the mid-1980s, Don initiated projects in Jordan, beginning with a broad site survey. His specialization in material culture was ceramics, publishing significant studies on ceramics sequencing. An influential study published in 1988 was that at eighth-century Khirbat al-Mafjar in Jericho in Bilad al-Shām or Greater Syria. Additionally, and most significantly, his work at Ayla, near Aqaba, focused his scholarship on the development of the Early Islamic city.This work of the late 1970s and 1980s set the stage for the consolidation of his research interests and scholarship between the mid-1990s and early 2000s in the formation of a specifically defined Islamic archaeology combined with Islamic urbanism. His scholarship in Islamic archaeology established the state of research in the field in Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf. His urbanism studies of Fustat (Egypt), Ba‘albek, Caesarea, and Jerusalem determined new strategies in the methodology of Islamic urban history. He, also with others, established the first meetings on Islamic Archaeology at ICAANE (International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East) between 2008 and 2010 (Eger 2024: 5).The next stage of his career is where my interactions with Don began—between 2009 and 2019. I first met Don at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (probably in 2009/2010) when he was excavating along with the director of the Palestinian Antiquities Authority, and later we were in the same Islamic session at the ICAANE meeting held in 2014 in Basel, Switzerland. Don, his colleagues, and students also participated regularly in ASOR (now American Society of Overseas Research) and multiple times in sessions on the Archaeology of Islamic Society at ASOR.Further, Don participated and contributed a paper in 2017 to an international conference co-organized by me and Joan Branham at Providence College. His topic clearly was aligned with my closely similar period research on the seventh-century Islamic monuments of the Haram al-Sharif and its administrative district south of the sanctuary, and focused on an earlier dating of these monuments than had previously been established in scholarship (Whitcomb, forthcoming and 2016).In 2016, my co-author and colleague Isam Awwad (1943–2018) (former chief architect and conservator of the Islamic monuments of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem) met multiple times with Don in visits to sites in the Jordan Valley that we were all considering to also be dated to the seventh-century reign of Mu‘āwiya (660–680). We first visited Katia Cytryn-Silverman’s mosque, palace, and bath site south of Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee, which had been dated to the eighth-century early Islamic period (Cytryn-Silverman 2009). Don had early on in 2002 proposed that the site of Beit Yerah was the palace of Sinnabra known to have been built by Mu‘āwiya by the mid-seventh century. Our visit to the site with Don, Rafi Greenberg, and Tawfiq Da‘adli in the spring of 2016 was at the moment that excavations recommenced by the three archaeologists, which by 2018 confirmed archaeologically that it was the site of Sinnabra and may have included an early mosque (Da‘adli 2017; Greenberg, Tal, and Da‘adli 2017; Da‘adli, Whitcomb, and Greenberg 2019).Discussions with Don and Isam during and after these visits helped to solidify my arguments for the establishment of statehood in the Early Islamic period, a monumental architecture supporting statehood by the mid-seventh century by Mu‘āwiya (660–680), accomplished before he became the first Umayyad ruler and fully expressed in Jerusalem (St. Laurent 2019, 2025). As with the latter, Don’s research in urban history and the archaeology of the administrative district south of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem supports the earlier dating previously not explored in scholarship. Recent excavations by Israeli archaeologists provide much evidence to support this earlier attribution. These conversations both in person and digitally have been sorely missed since both of my colleagues have passed, Isam in August of 2018 and Don more recently in 2024.