Strata: Hi-Tech Paper Wins Dever Prize

Coauthors Heather Dana Davis Parker and Ashley Fiutko Arico, both Ph.D. candidates at Johns Hopkins University, won this year’s Sean W. Dever Memorial Prize. Their paper, “A Moabite-Inscribed Statue Fragment from Kerak: Possible Egyptian Parallels,” presents new research on a basalt fragment recovered from El-Kerak, Jordan. The fragment was examined from both epigraphical and art historical perspectives, as it bears both a Moabite inscription and artistic decoration. As part of their analysis of the fragment, the authors employed Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) techniques.^a Based on the results of their study, the authors concluded that the El-Kerak fragment once belonged to an Egyptian or Egyptianizing statue.

The award is given to the best published article or paper presented at a conference by a Ph.D. candidate in Syro-Palestinian or Biblical archaeology. Parker and Arico’s paper was presented in 2011 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), both in San Francisco.