AIYS after 40
Reflections on the History of AIYS
The American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS) celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2018. Founded in 1977, the first office in Ṣan‘ā' was opened in 1978 under the directorship of Dr. Jon Mandaville. During its 40 years AIYS has supported American, other foreign and Yemeni researchers with fellowships and assistance for research permission through its Yemeni counterpart, the Center for Research and Studies.
This page contains reflections and photographs from former AIYS officers, resident directors and fellows. We encourage anyone who has used the facilities of AIYS or benefited from assistance to send their reflections and photographs for inclusion, as AIYS goes forward to assist our colleagues in Yemen.
If you'd like to contribute to these reflections, please reach out to aiys.us@aiys.org
Delores Walters
Delores Walters in Wadi Dhabab, 1994
I first went to Yemen in the summer of 1981 on a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) Fellowship to study spoken Arabic, having minored in Modern Standard Newspaper Arabic at NYU. My Arabic language study was in preparation for a doctoral dissertation fellowship in cultural anthropology funded by SSRC and Fulbright between 1982-84. Steven Caton, who was director of the Peace Corps in Sanaa, headed the language-training program, which included several Yemeni teachers. Peace Corps residents in Sanaa that year included American, Dutch, British and German volunteers. Steve introduced me to Leigh Douglas who was resident director of AIYS at the time.
It was quite a shock to learn later that Leigh Douglas was one of three men, including two British citizens, killed in Beirut in 1986 in retaliation for the U.S. bombing of Libya.
Leigh had taken genuine interest in my research and was particularly helpful in insuring that Lee Maher, my partner at the time, would be able to accompany me when I returned to Yemen in 1982 to begin my field research. He had made the introductions at the Yemen Center for Research & Studies (YCRS) to begin the process of obtaining residency and research clearance. AIYS and the resident directors were chiefly responsible for connecting Americans to the Yemeni research center and were especially helpful in that regard. Once introduced, the staff and director of YCRS, Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Maqalih, (also a literary scholar and poet) were remarkably helpful, kind and attentive. Lealan Swanson became resident director of AIYS early during our stay. Occasionally, Lee filled in for Lealan when the latter was away for short periods.
AIYS provided a wonderful venue for meeting and networking with other researchers, Americans -- early “pioneers” in Yemen, including, Najwa Adra and Dan Varisco, Sheila Carapico, Jon Swanson, Shelagh Weir, Cynthia Myntti, Huda Seif, and Barbara Croken. Some of these fellow researchers helped prior to our arrival in the country or afterwards during our transition. Among the other foreign nationals I met were Ursula Dreibholz, Fr. Etienne Renaud and the French researchers such as Jean Lambert, all of whom were especially warm and welcoming.
Barbara Croken, Lee Maher and Delores Walters, 1982
Delores and Lee Maher, 1982
One of those supportive pioneers was Tomas Gerholm, a Swedish anthropologist who wrote one of the earliest analyses of Yemeni hierarchical society in the modern era -- Market, Mosque and Mafraj. His untimely death in 1995 was also a sad memory. As my work would similarly focus on social hierarchy, particularly at the bottom of Yemen’s intricate ranking system, Tomas and I spent many hours in the early days of my field research in discussion that proved extremely beneficial to my understanding of social relations. Yemeni sociologists we met initially -- Hamud al Oudi and particularly Abdo Ali Othman provided an invaluable understanding of Yemen’s social hierarchy from an essential and indispensable Yemeni perspective.
When I finally found a place to carry out my 18 month-long research, I remember the young lads who I encountered in the Suq ad Dhabab, just south of Taizz, being highly amused upon reading in my research permission letter that my work would focus on the akhdam, an outcaste, African-identified group who lived in separate enclaves in the region. I had already concluded that while I could have arranged daily visits to the akhdam shantytown in Sanaa without venturing farther afield, it was not the setting with multiple group interactions that I had envisioned. The shantytown had invariably been described as a heap of garbage making, resident participant-observation nearly impossible.
Tomas Gerholm and Lee Maher, 1982
In Yemen, I was almost never taken for an American. Invariably, Yemenis wherever we traveled in the country presumed that because I must be of African descent and spoke Arabic that precluded my being a citizen of the United States. They also perceived an appropriate age difference between my partner Lee and myself therefore presumed that she was my mother despite the fact that Lee was fair skinned and I, especially in the sunny environs of Yemen, was very brown. Another assumption was that I was the sister of the boxer Muhammad Ali as Yemeni experience of African Americans was limited to such notables as the internationally renowned boxer. Thus Yemenis constructed our identities on their own cultural terms and according to their exposure to others via television most often powered by village generators.
We were a known and protected entity in the village of Wadi Dhabab, and that continued after we relocated in the town of ‘Abs in the northern Tihama to complete our research agenda. The town, unlike the village, was more open and accessible to both ‘Absi and non-‘Absi residents. We attached ourselves to the clinic (mustashfa), which during the 1980s was operated by an international team of doctors and nurses, notably from Ethiopia and England. In that environment, we again achieved the status of protected and highly regarded guests among our Yemeni neighbors.
AIYS was a major support financially and logistically through several subsequent research trips to Yemen, between 1994-1998. In the 1990s, the clinic facility in ‘Abs, now the Maternal & Child Health Center, was run by the murshidat (literally health guides) who had been trained as midwives and as the primary care givers for mothers and children. Sudanese midwives were their teachers. My video, Murshidat: Female Primary Health Care Workers Transforming Society in Yemen (1999) focuses on these women. In addition to delivering babies and treating illnesses such as malaria, many of them routinely conducted home health visits in the market area (suq) where the social outcastes lived. These murshidat activists were thereby breaking down social barriers that would have rendered African-identified akhdam and formerly enslaved ‘abid outside the delivery of health services, despite the official abolition of such stigmatized and marginalized status.
Screening of Murshidat at AIYS, 1998
Among those who lent their expertise and support in the production of the video were Najwa Adra, Raja’a al Musabi, Marina deRegt, Noha Sadek, AIYS resident director, and Amat al Alim as Suswa, then deputy secretary to the Minister of Information who facilitated my obtaining archival footage of the 1962 revolution in what was then North Yemen that I used in the video. Other productive encounters at AIYS during my postdoctoral research were Janine Clark, Lucine Taminian, Ria Ellis (executive director of AIYS), Barbara Michael and Husnia al Qadri.
The screening debut of Murshidat took place in the AIYS mufraj in December 1998 with an audience that included AIYS hostel residents who were members of an ICD (International Cooperation for Development) team from London, Namibia, Somalia and Zimbabwe. Others such as Basma al Qubayti, director of a non-profit training facility for girls in Sana’a, had assisted in research pertaining to the murshidat. Similarly, the murshidat, and their clients -- mothers and some fathers – also viewed the completed video in the ‘Abs clinic in December 1998. Ra’ufa Hassan, one of the first female journalists in Yemen, showed it to her Women’s Studies class at Sanaa University. It was also presented to the American Embassy in Yemen’s capital. The Murshidat video was well received and can be seen on YouTube. Steven Caton, professor and former director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard, facilitated the acquisition of the video for one of the university’s libraries.
AIYS has promoted the work of researchers in Yemen, providing financial, logistical and residential support (through its hostel) for four decades. In my experience, visiting scholars form a community thereby creating an invaluable resource for scholarly endeavors. It is crucial that AIYS continues to provide such a haven for researchers as their work will especially matter in the recovering environment beyond the current crisis.
Noha Sadek
Since I landed in Sanaa for the first time on a brisk early morning with Ed Keall and four other members of the Canadian Mission of the Royal Ontario Museum in Zabīd, Yemen became the main focus of my research and AIYS played an important role in providing a reassuring base, administrative support as well as contacts with fellow researchers. Located near the Tourism office on Taḥrīr Square, AIYS in 1982 was a small house whose director, Leigh Douglas, gave us spartan but reassuring headquarters. Gazing then at AIYS’s colourful qamariyas, I had little inkling that I would return to Yemen three years later for my Ph.D. thesis research on Rasulid architecture.
Noha Sadek in AIYS office in Bayt al-Sammān,
December 1997
Thus, I deemed myself lucky to have been awarded the AIYS doctoral fellowship for 1985-86. I shrugged off objections voiced over the fellowship being given to a Canadian, and I spent most of my six-month research period in Ta‘izz studying its magnificent Rasulid monuments. By then, AIYS had moved to a house on 26 September street but I did not reside there during my trips to Sanaa as I lived in Selma Al-Radi’s house in ḥārat al-ʿAjamī, an alley named after the family that owned most of the buildings in it, and whose major landmark was the French Centre for Yemeni Studies (CFEY). I subsequently returned to Yemen to continue work on Zabīd with the CAMROM, and with the help of local historian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ḥaḍramī I succeeded in mapping the town’s 86 mosques. Our common interest in Yemeni architecture made Selma and I decide to embark on a survey of Yemen’s painted mosques, for which we received an AIYS grant in 1993 that allowed us to hire a car and a driver that made travel to remote mountainous regions, where several of these incredible buildings were located, a lot easier.
Noha Sadek on the mosque trail in Zabid
(Photo by Ed Keall)
Noha Sadek with Qadi Ismāʿīl al-Akwaʿ in Zabīd, 1988 (Photo by Ed Keall)
Once more, my non-US citizen status was overlooked when I returned to Sanaa in January 1995 as Resident Director. By then, AIYS was located in the imposing Bayt al-Aʿraj house in Ṣāfīyah, but unfortunately, the building’s great need for repair and a steep rent hike forced us to move AIYS to yet another location. The house of former waqf minister, ʿAlī al-Sammān, on al-Bawnīyah Street provided another temporary base until it was relocated afterwards to the nearby Bayt Hāshim.
Following its unification in 1990, Yemen attracted a new generation of scholars with outstanding research projects in different regions in addition to Sanaa, in the Tihama, Yāfiʿ, Ḥaḍramawt, etc. The growth of AIYS’s erstwhile shoestring funding through different US bodies (largely USIA & CAORC) meant an increase in the number of fellowship grants to Americans as well as to Yemeni scholars. Liaison with Yemeni institutions (primarily GOAMM and YCRS), overseeing the AIYS translation series, holding lectures by resident and visiting scholars, coordinating fellowship applications for Yemeni researchers, co-preparing the setup of the Arabic language training with YLC, answering queries, the running of the hostel and the library: these were some of the many tasks that occupied my three-year tenure. Moreover, AIYS signed in 1995 an agreement with the government of the Netherlands to administer Dutch funding allotted for the restoration of the 16th century madrasa al-ʿĀmirīyah in Radā‘. Undertaken by the tireless Selma Al-Radi, this colossal project received an Aga Khan award in 2007.
I must add that it was also thrilling to witness the introduction of internet in Yemen in 1996, which needless to say, made communications more rapid despite its early glitches. I will conclude these random thoughts by stating that my administrative tasks, and no doubt those of my successors, were considerably facilitated by the great skills and good humour of Ria Ellis who was appointed Executive Director in the US in the same year I became Resident Director in Sanaa.
Street flooded after heavy rain, Mac Gibson in front of AIYS Bayt al-Aʿraj, Spring 1995, (photo by
Ria Ellis)
AIYS Bayt al- Sammān 1995, main building with office, mafraj and hostel, library in separate annex
(photo by Noha Sadek)
Mac Gibson and Noha Sadek trying to figure out how to divert the water in front of AIYS, Bayt al-Aʿraj, Spring 1995 (photo by Ria Ellis)
Lucine Taminian giving a lecture in AIYS mafraj in Bayt al- Sammān, March 1996 (photo by Ria Ellis)
Steve Caton
Steve Caton (right) and Najwa Adra in al-Ahjur, February, 1979
In its early days, AIYS seemed to operate on a shoe-string budget. (Perhaps its officers would maintain that it still does so today.) And so its first resident director Jon Mandaville had to be entrepreneurial to make ends meet, and one of his money-making schemes was to sell t-shirts that had an image and “American Institute for Yemeni Studies” printed on the front. I believe this was sometime in 1980. I bought one. I only could afford to buy one because I too had a hard time making ends meet on my meager fellowship. I imagine my student colleagues in AIYS were not much better off financially, and so I wonder how big a money-maker the t-shirts were in the end.
I’ve kept t-shirts over the years which I associate with different places I’ve been to, and this has amounted to quite a collection. When I rummage through my drawers to retrieve one, I pick a t-shirt that seems to fit my mood on that day. Even after they’ve gotten torn or faded, I continue to wear them, until I reluctantly consign their tatters to the scrap heap, where they have second lives as cleaning rags.
But there are some t-shirts I don’t wear very often, precisely because they are irreplaceable or one of a kind, and my t-shirt from the early days of AIYS fit this description. I wore it while I was still doing fieldwork in Yemen, and afterwards again when I grew nostalgic for those days. But around ten years ago, I decided not to wear it at all, lest it suffer the fate of my other worn-out, thread-bare t-shirts, so I “retired” it to the bottom of the drawer and hardly saw it again. In time, I forgot it was even there.
Until Dan Varisco put out the call for memories of AIYS on the anniversary of its founding. I asked myself whether that t-shirt from so long ago was still in my possession.
I was relieved that it was, and not the worse for wear either because of the precautions I had taken with it. It is a Hanes cotton-polyester mix made in the USA, size XL46-48. (Why so large, I wonder?) It’s gray (I don’t recall whether this was the only color it came in or just the one I chose because of its elegance). On its front is the image Jon had chosen to symbolize AIYS, a qamariyyah or stained glass Yemeni window, ringed at the top with a half-inch black line and edged at the bottom with a slightly narrower one. The window design is white, simulating the white-plaster of the original, though the panes of glass are not colored but gray, no doubt to keep the cost low. Underneath the window, on the side where the heart is, is clearly written in Arabic the title that can also be found on the left, American Institute for Yemeni Studies.
The choice of window design leaves me a bit puzzled now. The Star of David is on prominent display in the middle. As we all know, this is not an uncommon sight in Yemeni windows, and yet to be displayed on a t-shirt promoting an American research institute: did this not seem politically provocative? Or were these rhetorically more “innocent” times? The white on the window is also peeling off (it’s an appliqué) which is no doubt another reason I stopped wearing it. Every time I washed it, the appliqué was more degraded until the window looked to be in ruins.
I don’t want to make too much of the metaphor (or perhaps the synecdoche), but that t-shirt stands in for AIYS more than I could have imagined when I first bought it. A little worn. A little faded. Still provocative (perhaps more so than before). Retired to the bottom for safe-keeping until the day when it can function at full-strength again. Certainly not ready for the scrap heap. Its name emblazoned over the heart.
Steven C. Caton is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. His first book was Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (1993) and he has also written Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (2006).
Note: Charles Schmitz has noted that the star on the AIYS t-shirt is actually 5-sided and not the star of David.
Janet Watson
Editor’s Note: Dr. Janet Watson is Leadership Chair for Language at Leeds University. Her main research interests lie in the documentation of Modern South Arabian languages and modern Arabic dialects, with particular focus on theoretical phonological and morphological approaches to language varieties spoken within the south-western Arabian Peninsula. Since 2006, she has been documenting dialects of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages spoken in the far south of the Arabian Peninsula. She has written three books on Ṣan‘ānī dialect.
I was at AIYS between November 1985 and February 1987. The resident director at the time was Paul Martin, who lived in the AIYS building near the hospital with his wife Laila. Later he was replaced by Jeff Meissner. I tried to get AIYS sponsorship in 2008 when I began to work on the Mehri spoken in al-Mahra, but research sponsorship was becoming difficult to obtain at that time.
I remember taking a taxi from the airport with the Hungarian Ambassador. I had flown with Aeroflot. The building was clean and traditional, and everything I needed was supplied. Once the AIYS building moved to a more traditional building near al-Gā’, I remember wishing I had arrived later to Yemen. I loved that building.
I remember thinking years before I went to Yemen that I had travelled widely, but that what I would really like to do would be travel into the past. For me, going to Yemen in the 1980s was like travelling into the past. Working in Raymah at a time when there was no electricity and water had to be fetched, I remember looking up into the sky at night and seeing stars ripe for picking, like apples. I will never forget that sense of awe, and will always hope that the sight of a black, black sky with sharp, huge stars may return.
I remember meeting Jean Lambert and talking about music in Yemen. I had recorded women singing in the mountains by al-Jabin in Raymah and he was interested in the material. I went to the YCRS with Noha Sadek, who was also staying at AIYS. I visited her at the mosque in Taizz several months later. Tim Mackintosh-Smith first introduced me to AIYS when I wrote to him from SOAS in London. He was instrumental in my research then and continued to be for all the time I worked on Yemeni Arabic, and later on Yemeni Mehri. Selma al-Radi I met in 1986.
It is essential to show our Yemeni colleagues, both academic and non-academic, that we care and that we have not forgotten them or the country that helped our careers. I have colleagues in al-Mahrah and Ibb now who have not received salaries for almost 2 years. I receive whatsapp messages saying they have had to sell their gold, or their wife’s gold, in order to buy food. The world and its media have erected an iron shield between it and what is happening in Yemen. We cannot do the same.
Janet Watson at a book launch in Yemen in July, 2002
Dan Varisco
In early 1978 I arrived in Yemen to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on water allocation and springfed irrigation in the Yemen Arab Republic. Najwa Adra, my wife, would also be carrying out her dissertation research on the semiotics of Yemeni dance. I had a Fulbright-Hayes dissertation grant and Najwa had a National Science Foundation grant, so between the two of us we managed to support ourselves for a year and a half in the field. On the way to Yemen we had an unintended stop over in Egypt when our connecting Yemenia flight decided to leave three hours early from Cairo. When we finally arrived in Sanaa, we were met at the airport by a family friend who had an apartment overlooking Tahrir Square. Soon we found a temporary place to stay with a Yemeni family, while waiting for clearance and looking for an appropriate field site.
This was before AIYS had officially started, but the U.S. Embassy Cultural Affairs Officer Marjorie Ransom helped us through the process of getting permission to do our research and we were put under the umbrella of the Yemen Center for Studies and Research.
Dan Varisco in al-Ahjur, 1978
Najwa and Dan in al-Ahjur
On the way to Yemen we had stopped over in London and had a chance to visit Prof. R. B. Serjeant at Cambridge, where we also saw Martha Mundy at work on her thesis about irrigation in Wadi Dhahr. In Sanaa we were privileged to meet Qadi Ismail al-Akwa‘, one of Yemen’s most prolific modern scholars. One of our dearest friends was Père Etienne Renaud, who had a great love for Yemen and contributed to the study of Zaydi law.
In a couple of months we found our site, the breathtakingly beautiful valley of al-Ahjur, a headwater of Wadi Surdud. This had a spring line with allocation from cisterns into an extensive terrace network of agricultural plots.
We settled in a room in the country house of our host, Abdullah ‘Abd al-Qadir, and were within easy walking distance of several villages. I spent many afternoons in Abdullah’s afternoon qat chew, where local matters were discussed, an anthropologist dream time. Najwa and I can never repay the kindness of the people we met in al-Ahjur; they treated us as guests and were very patient with our questions.
al-Ahjur panorama
Dan and Etienne Renaud in Rome in 1983
We met Jon Mandaville and his family when he started as the first resident director of AIYS in Sanaa. Jon invited Najwa and myself on a vacation trip to the Tihāma, where I have vivid memories of a night spent on the beach under the palms, hearing the gently lapping waves, at Khawkha. In the 1980s I returned to Yemen many times as a development consultant and to do manuscript research in the Western Library of the Great Mosque. The small library room (the manuscripts were kept elsewhere) was run by two elderly gentleman, one of whom was almost deaf. His conversations on the telephone were at times quite hilarious. It was here that I first met the Yemeni historian Muhammad Jazm and we soon became close friends.
On my trips to Yemen I always stopped by AIYS, which changed buildings regularly, and was pleased to meet each new director and wave of researchers. In 1983, while I was starting an ARCE Fellowship in Cairo, I came to Yemen to write up the final draft of the USAID Social and Institutional Profile of Yemen. The AIYS President at the time, Manfred “Kurt” Wenner, had solicited articles from a number of scholars, but these had to be merged and edited into the kind of document that USAID needed. The anthropologist Barbara Pillsbury joined me for a marathon writing session and the result was a thorough analysis of the development context of Yemen as of 1983.
Dan and Muhammad Jazm
Even after I started full-time teaching in 1992, I would return at times for consulting. In 1990 I took over the newsletter of AIYS and created a bulletin called Yemen Update, with some of its articles and book reviews archived online. With funding assistance from Hunt Oil we were able to distribute hard copies. In 2014 I became President of AIYS, having served in the past as a secretary and board member. I created a Yemen Expert Guide to list the names and contacts of individuals with expertise in Yemeni Studies. I also have promoted a Scholar-to-Scholar Program to put Yemeni and foreign scholars into contact with each other for joint research and mentoring.
AIYS director Jeff Meissner and Dan in 1987
As I write these reflections, Yemen remains in a precarious humanitarian crisis with little end in sight. All of us who have worked in Yemen desire a peaceful settlement so that Yemen’s people can build up their own lives with freedom and security. America’s political choices have greatly angered many of Yemen’s people, but as an educational institute AIYS remains committed to promoting knowledge of all aspects of Yemen’s rich heritage and cultural diversity.
Charles Schmitz
Charles Schmitz in Sana'a
I was lucky to arrive in Yemen during the optimistic period that followed unification. By 1993, Ali Salem al-Baydh had already absconded in Aden and the expulsion of Yemeni laborers from Saudi Arabia took a toll on the economy, but there was still a euphoria for the new liberal era. At the time, AIYS in Safiya Shimaliya hosted a score of prominent researchers headed by Sheila Carapico. Sheila was hard at work on Civil Society composed on a laptop with no screen—as I remember, someone had rigged a big dusty desktop monitor to make do. Iris Glosemeyer meticulously collected newspaper articles on every prominent Yemeni political family and could recite the names of the mothers of the Members of Parliament, as well as their sons and granddaughters, by heart.
Anna Wuerth was a regular fixture in family court and the court of AIYS’s mafraj gatherings. Eng Seng Ho appeared occasionally in from the Hadhramawt to boil lobsters (it took a long time in Sanaa’s high altitude) or fix a laptop. Resident Director David Warburton somehow managed to keep the place running. These scholars’ guidance and support were critical to my research in Yemen, and my gratitude to them and to AIYS led me to later serve AIYS in the hopes of providing a new generation of researchers the same supportive experience in Yemen.
I took up residence in al-Hawta, Lahj, to observe the reestablishment of property rights in agricultural land. Though completely rudderless, the Yemeni Socialist Party still controlled the south. Those with foresight in Lahj at the time were the Islahi activists in the rebuilt Ministry of Religious Endowments who were well prepared for their post-war reign of terror in al-Hauta. For comic relief, I would join the resident Abdali clan members whose stories of the socialist years in al-Hawta resembled Garcia Marquez’s surrealism. One of the Sultan’s relatives spent four years locked inside his house before finally emerging to join the socialist experiment in progress. My days in al-Hauta were interrupted by the Seventy Days War of 1994. Though we all had hoped the daily peace demonstrations would prevail, deployment of forces along the former border foreshadowed a different outcome. I flew out of Yemen seated on the rear door of a C-130.
By the time I returned to Yemen in 2001, AIYS had grown significantly thanks to Sheila Carapico and Mac Gibson’s work in the early nineties. AIYS indeed had operated on a shoestring for its early history (see Steve Caton’s t-shirts), but tired of running AIYS with student help from her office at the University of Richmond, Sheila applied for new grants that allowed AIYS to hire professional staff. In 1996 AIYS under Mac Gibson hired its first executive director, Ria Ellis, who ran AIYS from her palatial home office in Ardmore, PA. Ria and her assistant, Joan Reilly, not only administered an expanded AIYS but also produced a spree of new publications, including much of the translations series by Lucine Taminian and Noha Sadek and Sam Leibhaber’s Diwan of Hajj Dakon. In the early 2000s under Tom Stevenson’s watch, AIYS landed a Middle East Partnership Initiative grant for a permanent residence. Hired as resident director in 2000, Chris Edens undertook the arduous task of finding a permanent building. Chris not only found a well located and suitable building, but also oversaw its substantial reconstruction and the relocation of AIYS from the Bayt al-Hashem location.
By the time Mac Gibson asked if I would consider leading AIYS in late 2004, AIYS was set to enjoy its most expansive period. The Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), of which AIYS is a member, ran the Critical Languages Program and assigned AIYS the task of creating a program for Arabic students. In the mid-2000s, AIYS built a successful language program and had plans to expand the footprint of the new building to include additional space for students. The foundation for the new hostel was built and AIYS readied for increasing numbers of new students of Arabic, when al-Qaeda’s attack on the US Embassy in September 2008 abruptly ended AIYS’ expansion plans. In the new era of security restrictions, no students or researchers could come to Yemen on Federal grants; Federal money could be used only outside of the U.S. and Yemen. Though implausible, some AIYS grantees came up with ingenious ways to work on Yemen without setting foot in the country. Nancy Um spent time in Europe looking at colonial archives that addressed trade in Mokha, and Sam Leibhaber set up camp in Salala, Oman to study Yemen’s Mahran language. The new restrictions closed AIYS’ language program and severely reduced the number of researchers arriving in Sanaa.
AIYS building under construction in 2007
Stephen Steinbeiser arrived in 2009 to relieve Chris Edens and stabilize AIYS under the new security restrictions. Stephen managed to rework the foundation in the back of AIYS designed for student rooms into a beautiful addition to the main building. Stephen also succeeded in cultivating a vibrant research environment despite the restrictions. He added a series of lectures by Yemeni fellows of AIYS grants and worked with Yemeni officials on the sticks project (translation of Himyaritic inscriptions on wood sticks) as well as plans for rebuilding the tower at Sanaa Military Museum for a new children’s museum.
Stephen was just feeling settled in Sanaa when the protests of the Arab Spring erupted. The AIYS building was close to the battle lines separating Ali Muhsin’s troops from Ali Abdallah Saleh’s, and Stephen had to use a rear exit to stay out of the line of fire. Nevertheless, the Institute remained open and several journalists arrived to cover the historic events. There were even Yemeni scholars who used the library throughout the tumultuous summer of 2010.
Ria Ellis, Ammar, and Abdallah
at the side entrance under construction, 2007
The installation of the Hadi government seemed to open a route to a new renaissance. Yemen’s mediated approach contrasted with the devastating wars in Libya and Syria, so the National Dialogue Conference attracted attention from across the globe. However, by my last visit to Yemen in the summer of 2013, underlying tensions were clear. The security situation deteriorated as well as the economy, and the Hadi government proved incapable of managing any of the new challenges facing Yemen.
Meanwhile, AIYS saw the retirement of Ria Ellis and a quick move for our main office to Boston University before landing in Washington DC under CAORC’s care. Today Heidi Wiederkehr at CAORC patiently negotiates the difficulties of transferring funds to AIYS in Sanaa through sanctions and banking failures, while satisfying the USG’s insistence upon accounting for every fraction of a penny. When Dan Varisco relieved me in 2014, his first task was to find a new resident director who was not a US citizen. AIYS was very fortunate to find Dr. Salwa Dammaj who upon taking up residence at AIYS was immediately forced to deal with incursions of Houthi militias. Dr. Dammaj successfully negotiated a Houthi retreat and today manages to keep AIYS alive in Sanaa in hope of a better day for researchers in the country.
AIYS still runs a small grant competition for Yemeni scholars, keeping a window open for future research in Yemen. Over seventy Yemeni researchers completed applications for the 2018 grant cycle. Sadly, only a fraction will receive support, but donations to enhance Yemen’s future research can be made to the Abdulkarim Al-Eryani Scholarship Fund on the AIYS website.
Charles Schmitz is Professor and Graduate Program Director, Department of Geography & Environmental Planning at Towson University
Sam Liebhaber
It is a daunting task for me to list the ways that the AIYS has guided and supported my research in Yemen; they are almost too many to count. Indeed, my experience in learning about Yemen and developing proficiency in its languages is inseparable from my relationship to the AIYS, which has stood as one of the few constants in a changing – and often tumultuous – landscape.
My first encounter with the AIYS dates back to my earliest steps in learning Arabic at the beginning of my graduate career in 1998. I spent the summer studying Arabic at the Center for the Arabic Language and Eastern Studies (CALES) in the Old City of Sana’a and a colleague brought me to the AIYS, which at the time was located on al-Bawniya street. During that summer, I spent many pleasant hours studying and reading about Yemen in the AIYS library – a lovely, glass-enclosed space that looked out onto a courtyard garden.
When I returned to Yemen the following year for further language study, I was once again welcomed to the AIYS by the resident director, Marta Colburn, who offered me guidance and advice on future research and studies in Yemen. On a side trip to Asmara in 2000, I befriended Bob Holman, New York-based poet/performer and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, at a conference and cultural celebration marking Eritrean independence. Bob was gathering information for his TV documentary, On the Road with Bob Holman, and when I told him about Yemen’s vibrant poetic culture, he returned back with me to Sana’a. Marta Colburn graciously arranged for Bob and myself to attend the weekly gathering of literati in the home of Dr. Abd al-Aziz al-Maqalih, Yemen’s “poet laureate”, who was impressed by Bob’s extemporaneous composition and performance of a poem about the beauty and elegance of Sana’a.
Sam Liebhaber with Gregory Johnsen in Sanaa, 2004, having an evening cup of shay halib at Ali al-‘Imrani’s café in Sana’a, next to the Qubaat al-Mahdi, overlooking the Sayla.
This led to an offer to Bob and myself to translate Dr. Abd al-Aziz al-Maqalih’s Book of Sana’a – myself an Arabic neophyte and Bob a Nuyorican slam poet. Marta Colburn wisely engaged a friend of hers, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Mansur, to help us with the translation. Muhammad Abd al-Salam remains a close friend and served as a frequent mentor to me during my subsequent visits in Yemen. After a few years of work, our translation of the Book of Sana’a was published in Yemen thanks to the effort and support of the AIYS, especially that of Christopher Edens who assumed the role of resident director after the departure of Marta Colburn and who oversaw the final editing and annotation of the Book of Sana’a.
Sam Liebhaber, 2004, doing some shopping
in Suq al-Qaa’
The introductions that Marta Colburn and Christopher Edens provided put me in good stead for my future research in Yemen. For one, my affiliation with the AIYS opened doors for me at the Yemen Center for Studies and Research (YCSR) where Dr. Abd al-Aziz al-Maqalih presided as its director. Thanks to the friendly relations maintained between the AIYS and YCSR, American scholars were welcome to the extraordinary resources of the YCSR – including visa sponsorship – and this perhaps at the lowest point for the US reputation in the Arab world due to the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison by Americans in Iraq. Thanks to the public lectures held at the AIYS, its support for Yemeni scholars, and the open doors of its library, the AIYS has rendered a tremendous service to the image of Americans living in Yemen.
Having determined to focus my research on the oral poetic traditions of the Mahra in Eastern Yemen, I was able to spend 2003-2004 in Yemen thanks to an AIYS research fellowship and once again, the AIYS once again played a crucial role in providing logistical, academic, and personal support (in addition to the aforementioned financial support). I was a frequent guest of the AIYS hostel – now located in the beautiful, historic Bayt al-Hashim in Bir al-‘Azab – where I profited immensely from interacting with fellow Yemeni and foreign scholars who made use of the AIYS library facilities or resided there. While I was based in Aden or al-Ghaydha for much of the time, I looked forward to week-long vacations at the AIYS in Sana’a where Christopher Edens provided a space for friendly conversations and scholarly discussions between AIYS residents, friends, and staff. The work that I completed during this year formed the basis of my dissertation, “Bedouins Without Arabic: The Oral Poetry of the Mahra of Southeast Yemen”, which in turn yielded a number of articles about orature in the Mahri language.
The AIYS was always willing to help advance the cause of public scholarship about al-Mahra in Yemen. For instance, the AIYS provided support to the Mahri poet, Hajj bir Ali bir Dakon, towards the composition of the first written collection of poetry in the Mahri language – The Dīwān of Ḥājj Dākon (AIYS, 2011) – and funded its publication. This collection – bearing the imprint of the AIYS – marked the first publication of literary-aesthetic texts in the Mahri language, and thanks to its publication in Yemen, it was likewise available to a Yemeni and Mahri readership. Getting this publication to press – with texts in type-set and handwritten Mahri and facing Arabic translation, plus an English translation and transcription for each poem – would have been impossible without the herculean labors of Maria de Ellis, the non-resident director of the AIYS, who along with Joan Reilly, the assistant director of the AIYS, took charge of editing, proofreading, and formatting Hajj Dakon’s poetic collection.
I was able to return to Yemen in 2008 to continue recording and translating Mahri poetry, thanks again to the support provided by an AIYS research grant. In addition to spending time in al-Ghaydha, I was hosted at the AIYS’ extraordinary new facilities: a walled villa near al-Qaa’. Under the supervision of the resident director Stephen Steinbeiser, the AIYS’ undertook to build this facility using tradition Yemeni techniques and materials, yielding a spacious and self-sufficient hostel, library, and meeting space. It was a pleasure to stay at the new facility and reacquaint myself with staff whom I hadn’t seen for a number of years – especially Amir and Mulk – who continued to enliven the AIYS’ hostel with their conversation and song.
In 2008, it was clear that Yemen as a unified republic was beginning to unravel and the AIYS facility in Sana’a subtly transformed in my mind from being a comfortable and hospitable residency to a safe and secure one, and thanks to the foresight of Stephen Steinbeiser, the officers of the AIYS, and the AIYS’ current resident director, Salwa al-Dammaj in crafting a plan for electric and water self-sufficiency, I understand that the AIYS facility in Sana’a continues to be one of the few functioning academic facilities in Sana’a at the present time.
In 2011, I hoped to return to Yemen to continue my research in al-Mahra. However, the situation in Yemen had deteriorated to the point that it was impossible to do. Instead, the AIYS offered me the possibility of using a research grant to visit Salalah where I could work with Mahri speakers living in Dhofar or visiting from Yemen. With the support of the AIYS, I started work on a curated digital exhibit of Mahri poetry in 2011-2012 based on materials I collected in Salalah as well as earlier work from al-Mahra. The resulting online exhibit of Mahri poetry – When Melodies Gather – was published by Stanford University Press in Spring 2018 under its newly inaugurated digital publications unit.
Even though travel to Yemen has become prohibitively dangerous since 2014, the AIYS has continued to demonstrate its utility and support for research. Working though social media, the AIYS current resident director, Salwa al-Dammaj, put me in contact with a number of participants in the Yemeni National Dialogue Conference. Thanks to these remote introductions, I was able to prepare an analysis of Mahri and Soqotri language recognition in the various committees tasked by the National Dialogue to study this issue, as well as the language that ultimately made it into the draft Yemeni constitution of 2014. I presented my analysis at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in 2015 on a panel, “Tolerance and Turmoil: Unpacking the Current Crisis in Yemen”, sponsored by the AIYS. I am very grateful to Daniel Varisco, President of the AIYS, for organizing this panel.
Finally, I have had the honor serving on the Yemeni fellowship committee of the AIYS where I have read and evaluated grant proposals from Yemeni scholars annually since 2009. Over the eight years that I have served on this committee, I have seen the number of applicants increase from five in 2009 to forty-seven highly qualified individuals in 2017. Few components of my professional career have been as satisfying as following this development, although this feeling is tempered by the fact that Yemeni scholars must now turn to foreign agencies to support their work at a time when Yemeni academic institution are in disarray. However, the caliber of research engaged in by Yemeni scholars and activists over the range of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences is a testament to the persistent intellectual ambition of our Yemeni colleagues in the face of heart-wrenching circumstances. While the funds available for this program are extremely limited, I suspect that the Yemeni research grants provided by the AIYS are one of the few instances in Yemen right now in which the word “American” evokes positive associations.
In conclusion, I am profoundly grateful to the AIYS for all of its support over the years I’ve studied in Yemen and carried out research there. The two – the Yemen and the AIYS – are intertwined in my mind to the degree that I can’t conceive of the former without the latter. The AIYS provides a critical service to scholarship about and from Yemen and is one of the few unarguably positive links in the relationship between Yemen and the United States.
Sam Liebhaber is Chair of the Arabic Department, Director of Middle East Studies and Associate Professor of Arabic at Middlebury College
Nathalie Peutz
It was during my first summer in Yemen as a novice Arabic student at the Yemen Language Center (YLC) in 1999 that I discovered the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and all that it had to offer. Conversations with prominent scholars based at or passing through YLC and a fortuitous meeting with AIYS resident director Marta Colburn led to my applying for a NMERTA/AIYS language fellowship for the following summer and, over time, to a fulfilling career that I owe entirely to Yemen and the repeated forms of AIYS support that helped launch it. Looking back, it is difficult for me to imagine how I would have navigated my anthropological research in Yemen or my academic career without the financial, material, logistical, and social support in addition to the physical base that AIYS provided.
Nathalie Peutz in Homhil, Soqotra (2003, AIYS fellowship)
Justin Stearns on the roof of the AIYS hostel on al-Bawniya Street (2003)
In 2000, this AIYS support enabled me to return to Yemen for further Arabic study. Living in the delightful home on al-Bawniya street, my partner Justin Stearns and I enjoyed numerous lively discussions with other resident scholars in its charming mafraj and kitchen spaces. It was here, in 2000 and the years following, that we first met several of our current and former institutional colleagues: Marion Katz (New York University), Maurice Pomerantz (NYU Abu Dhabi), and Samuel Liebhaber (Middlebury College). It was also through the AIYS that I met Nancy Um, who kindly invited me along on a research trip to al-Hudaydah and al-Mokha. This experience, and a subsequent cattle boat crossing from al-Mokha to Berbere and from Djibouti back to Mokha, deepened my interests in Yemen’s Horn of Africa connections and motivated my initial research on Somali refugees and deported migrants in al-Hudaydah (January 2002, spring 2003) and in Somaliland (summer 2002, fall 2003). Little could I have guessed then that I would end up returning to Somaliland and Djibouti in 2016, this time to begin research with Yemeni refugees in the Horn of Africa (see link), instead of with Somali refugees in Yemen.
In 2003, an AIYS grant for preliminary research afforded me a good six months in Yemen to pursue potential dissertation topics. Whether it is because this was to be the longest period I have spent in Sanaa, or because of the tense build-up to the Iraq War, my memories of this period are particularly entwined with memories of the AIYS hostel. A week before our departure to Yemen, Justin Stearns and I were in New York City protesting the imminent invasion. A few weeks later, in Sanaa, foreign researchers were warned to stay away from protests and to avoid traveling around Yemen. What I remember most, apart from working in the AIYS’s extraordinary library, is the many hours we spent watching media coverage of the invasion, often with Selma al-Radi. Eventually, Justin and I “escaped” to Soqotra, from where we continued to watch the invasion and, then, the Fall of Baghdad. One day, however, we splurged on a half-day car rental and driver who took us to a protected area called Homhil. Again, little did I know then that I would end up living in Homhil just over a year later (2004–2005) and that I would continue to research and write about conservation, development, and heritage in Soqotra for over a decade to come. Generously funded by Fulbright-Hayes and a follow-up research grant from the AIYS (2007), and greatly facilitated by the AIYS’s resident director Chris Edens, this research resulted in my dissertation and my forthcoming book, Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press, 2018).
Justin Stearns outside my solar-powered house in Homhil, Soqotra (2004)
Taking fieldnotes inside my house in Homhil (photograph by J. Stearns, 2004)
After having shifted my research focus to Soqotra, I began spending less time in Sanaa and, consequently, less time at the AIYS hostel. Nevertheless, Chris and his successor, Steven Steinbeiser, continued to facilitate my research as well as to offer valuable guidance and advice. And, each time I visited Sanaa, the AIYS hostel—a vital sanctuary from the rigors of fieldwork—felt like home. It was here that I also benefitted from conversations with David Buchman, Steve Caton, Joy McCorriston, Miranda Morris, Carolyn Han, Lamya Khalidi, Michelle Lamprakos, Stacey Philbrick-Yadav, Sarah Phillips, Marjorie Ransom, Dan Varisco—to name just a few of the scholars I first met on its grounds—many of whom I have had the great privilege of working with in later years. The social connections forged in and through the AIYS hostel have been as indispensable as have been these academic networks. When I received the shocking news one night in Sanaa that my father had passed away, I immediately headed over to the AIYS hostel; this is where I knew to find logistical and emotional support.
Returning to Soqotra with my son (2007, AIYS fellowship)
Due to the ongoing tragedy of the war in Yemen, I now conduct research in the Horn of Africa instead. Many of the Yemeni refugees I interview these days in the Markazi camp in Djibouti tell me that they have decided against ever returning to Yemen, that Yemen is “khalas.” I sincerely hope that this is not the case—that there will be a welcome return for them someday in a Yemen that is peaceful, and healing. Until then, I take some small comfort in knowing that the AIYS is far from “khalas”—that it continues to open its doors to Yemeni scholars and to support essential research in and on Yemen. The AIYS has provided many invaluable services for so many scholars. I am deeply grateful to the institution and all of its hardworking directors, presidents, and staff for all the opportunities the AIYS has given me.
Nathalie Peutz is Program Head of Arab Crossroads Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Arab Crossroads Studies Program at New York University Abu Dhabi
Jon Swanson
When I arrived in Yemen with my wife and two children in January of 1974, there were few researchers in the country save perhaps for Tomas Gerholm in Manakha. On advice from Yemeni friends in the US, we settled in Taiz where we remained until the end of July 1975. In those days there was no AIYS so we were left to sort things out on our own. About a year after we returned to Detroit I got a call from Mac Gibson about a meeting at the University of Chicago to set up a research facility in Yemen. I thought this a fine idea and took the train to Chicago where I met with Mac, the late Manfred (Kurt) Wenner, Marvin Zonis, and perhaps one or two others whose names I can’t recollect. We ended up meeting two or three times.
View of Taiz
Under Mac’s leadership AIYS began to set up bylaws based on the bylaws of other research groups like the American Research Center in Egypt. It was orginally proposed that we might call AIYS the “American Research Center in Yemen” but this was rejected and we eventually settled on the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. I suggested that we include a rule in the bylaws barring anyone engaged on intelligence gathering from the institute on the grounds that researchers and research would be jeopardized if we were in any way perceived as government agents. This amendment found support and was adopted.
When I returned to Yemen in 1979, AIYS was in full swing with Jon Mandaville as the local director. He and his family were welcoming and very supportive. Like many researchers I stayed there briefly before I found an apartment. Other researchers there at the time included Barbara Croken, Tom Stevenson, Susan Dorsky, and Steve Caton. Subsequently Leigh Douglas became director. Leigh later taught at the American University of Beirut where he was tragically kidnapped and later assassinated by a faction of Hizballah after Reagan ordered airstrikes on Libya which killed members of Muammar Qadafis family.
From 1981-83 my then wife, Lealan Swanson, served as director of AIYS and she is best able to relate that chapter of the AIYS saga. One memory of that period which will probably not make her part of the story is that while my daughter and walking in gulleys west of Sanaa near the international school my daughter pointed out a stone hand axe. I subsequently collected a number of these and left them at AIYS. They certainly confirmed the ancient human occupation of the Sanaa plateau and the possibility of productive archaeological research in the area.
Jon Swanson was the first American anthropologist to do research in Yemen in the early 1970s. For an article by Jon on Yemeni emigration, click here.
Michel Zurowski
Michel at Sabanco place (Old Sanaa, Harat at-Talh)
In October 2010, I arrived Sanaa for a 10 months scholarship to practice Arabic language and get experience of Arabic culture. It was a basic scholarship set on agreement between the Polish and Yemeni governments. From the Polish side it has been used mostly by students of Arabic language studies, however Yemen was not a popular destination. That year only I and one girl came (and there were 5 places).
The scholarship was a great chance to gather material for my B.A. thesis on an introduction to Yemeni dialects. Because of that, I reached out to AIYS about its facilities in Sanaa. I got some directions from Faraj, but getting to AIYS was quite challenging as it was in an uncharacteristic house, located in a small alley near the Republican Hospital in al-Qa’a Street. There I met Faraj and Stephen (AIYS director at the time).
Date seller near Bab al-Yaman
Suq al-‘Arj (Donkey Market)
I have spent some long hours in AIYS library going through dialectological books and dictionaries. It contained everything that was written on Yemeni dialects. It was a very enjoyable time, but also crucial for my B.A. thesis. Unfortunately, at my home University of Warsaw, there were not any positions for dialectology.
My research coincided with turmoil times that shadowed the whole Arab world. My stay was cut short and I left Yemen on 3rd June, 2011, the same day bomb exploded in Presidential Palace and was supposed to kill Ali Abdullah Salih.
All my experiences with AIYS were great and fundamental for my academic success. Footnote 1 in my thesis states: “I got access to books in greatly supplied library of American Institute for Yemeni Studies, which contains, not only positions on Yemeni dialects, but also on South Arabic languages. Not to mention other subject areas”.
Beginning of Arab Spring in Yemen –demonstration next to Sanaa University
Ian Tattersall
AMNH PALEONTOLOGICAL SURVEYS IN YEMEN, 1988 AND 1991
When a paleontologist becomes interested in the fossil possibilities offered by a remote and unknown country, what does he or she do? In the case of a group based at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and intrigued by the paleontological potential they saw in the United States Geological Survey map of the Yemen Arab Republic, the answer was to turn to the American Institute of Yemeni Studies. Directly across the Red Sea from Ethiopia and Eritrea, northern Yemen is in many ways a geological mirror-image of those fossil-rich countries; and although it sadly lacks any equivalent of the famous Afar Triangle in which many of Ethiopia’s and all of Eritrea’s most famous fossils have been found, our preliminary review of the USGS map suggested that the largely unexplored fossil potential of Yemen was well worth looking into.
The Sana'a that greeted us in May, 1988
Accordingly, in 1987 Ian Tattersall, a curator in the AMNH’s Department of Anthropology, contacted Jon Mandaville, then the AIYS President. Jon was enormously helpful and encouraging, and put us in touch with Jeff Meissner, then Resident Director of AIYS in Sana’a. AIYS was already well established as the principal English-speaking center of research in history, archaeology and the humanities in Sana’a, but it had never welcomed geologists before. Jeff had the excellent idea of not putting us in touch with the Antiquities authorities with whom he customarily dealt, but instead with the Ministry of Oil and Mineral Resources of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). This was a brilliant decision, since the MOMR proved not only to be very supportive of our paleontological objectives, but also had the authority to issue us permits to prospect the entire Yemen Arab Republic for fossils.
With funding from the National Geographic Society in hand, the AIYS Center in Sanaa as a base, and preliminary research permission from the MOMR granted, an AMNH team travelled to Sanaa at the end of May, 1988, and remained until the middle of July. The group consisted of Ian Tattersall, Mike Novacek, then a Curator in the AMNH’s Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, now AMNH Provost, and Maurice Grolier, a geologist who had worked on the USGS geological map of Yemen – and who had also chosen the spot for the first manned lunar landing. Jeff Meissner joined us for some of our explorations, and we also benefited greatly from the advice of Dr Hamel El-Nakhal of the Geology Department of the University of Sana’a. AIYS provided the field vehicle as well as an essential center of operations, and we remain particularly grateful to His Excellency Ali Gabr Alawi, Deputy Minister of Oil and Mineral Resources, for his understanding of and support for our goals.
Maurice Grolier (l) and Ian Tattersall on the roof of the AIYS Sanaa building, 1988
During six weeks of exploration our group covered some 4,000 miles on mostly very poor or nonexistent roads and examined over 100 potential fossil localities in almost all parts of the YAR. Sadly, the results were less bountiful than we might have wished. Some traces of fish bone were collected from freshwater Oligocene deposits interbedded in the Yemen Volcanics at Jabal Matran, south of Tai’zz, and traces of fossil wood were found at this locality and in interbeds elsewhere, notably near the summit of Jabal an Nabi Shu’ayb, the highest point in the Arabian Peninsula.
Only at one locality, a quarry near the village of Khulaqah below the base of the late Cretaceous Tawilah Formation, did we collect significant vertebrate fossils: well-preserved lacustrine fish of ichthyodectiform affinity that were ultimately identified by our AMNH colleague John Maisey.
Although disappointingly unproductive of fossils, our 1988 explorations were not uneventful. Consider this extract from Mike Novacek’s engaging memoir, Time Traveler, describing a night-time event in the far north near Jabal Marah early in our wanderings:
“Meester Ian, Meester Mike, these are veeery bad men, they will keel us,” was Ali’s warning call. Ali was our sentry, our Yemeni escort from the Ministry of Oil and Mineral Resources … then I saw several heavily armed men jump out of the jeep and come stalking toward us. One surly fellow pointed his Soviet-built rifle at my head and started speaking … Jeff Meissner composed a translation of the fellow’s message … “This officer commands a patrol of the North Yemen border militia. He says that this is a very dangerous area – full of anarchists, gunrunners, smugglers, and hijackers … he forcefully ‘invites’ us to sleep at his army checkpoint.”
Prospecting in the outcrops at Jabal Matran
We duly proceeded to the checkpoint, and once there the commander attempted to relieve us of our passports while his henchmen took the keys to the AIYS Land Cruiser. Things were looking very ugly. The ensuing night of fitful sleep was, fortunately, followed by an unanticipated sudden liberation – possibly due to our letter from the MOMR having been verified – with an admonition never to return.
Prospecting (in vain) in the north
We might have learned from this incident, but as time passed unrewarded by fossils we became a little desperate. Finally, it appeared that our only good geological hopes lay in the Wadi al-Jawf, the “empty quarter” in the east that lay beyond government control. Jeff was dubious about risking the AIYS vehicle in this lawless territory, but eventually conceded to our pleas on the wise condition (for us) that he accompany us once more.
The Jawf turned out to be an attractive region where people lived and worked in forced-mud buildings that appeared as if from the beginning of time.
Within them the rooms were unadorned by Presidential portraits, and among them strolled bare-headed women in colorful knee-length dresses. The local people were definitely calling the shots here, and to a superficial observer the scene had a laid-back air about it. But all was not exactly easygoing. Cut back to Time Traveler, describing an episode that began as we were fruitlessly and despondently looking for vertebrate fossils in a road cut, and a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. The dust soon resolved into a convoy of Land Cruisers, bristling with heavily-armed men, that promptly surrounded us:
The man in the driver’s seat got out and walked purposefully toward me. He stopped within inches of my face and gave me a grimace and an interminable study.
“Where are you from?” he asked in perfect English, to my amazement.
“New York,” I said.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m from Detroit.”
The man explained that he had labored on the production lines of General Motors, made enough money, and had then returned to the Jawf to be the feudal lieutenant of the local sheikh. Somewhat ominously he continued, “the sheikh wishes to invite you to tea.”
Knowing the reputation of the Jawf for kidnappings and disappearances, our hearts sank into our boots. But we knew this was not an offer we could refuse. We joined the convoy and drove off into the desert, where our ultimately destination turned out to be an isolated but elegant building that was still under construction.
As we entered the newly painted mafraj, the Land Cruiser crew threw their weapons on to a large and growing pile in the middle of the floor and settled on cushions along the side. The sheikh began to adjudicate disputes among his subjects, and large quantities of qat were passed around. We were evidently in for the long chew, although we had no way of knowing how permanent the sheikh’s hospitality was going to be. In the end, the occasion was a convivial one, and the young sheikh proved to be highly personable, casually remarking to us (as translated by Jeff) that his family had sacked Sanaa twice, most recently in 1948.
Mansion in the Wadi Jawf
As the evening light started to fade and we were beginning to wonder what lay ahead for us, we were graciously ushered on our way, with an invitation to return any time under the sheikh’s protection. Never have I so bitterly regretted not having found a good fossil site. Even the sheikh appeared a little wistful, saying, as Mike recalls in his memoir: “I’m sorry we have too much oil and gold and not enough bones.”
This encounter ended the last major foray of our first exploration of Yemen, and to our great disappointment what we had found had not justified coming back. But a couple of years later we learned through Dr El-Nakhal that the impressions of fossil frogs had been found at Ar Rhyashia, near Rada’, and we were also informed by Scott Rolston, who took over as AIYS Sanaa Resident Director in 1989, that he had discovered part of a dinosaur skeleton near the main road north from Sanaa, just south of Sa’da. What is more, northern and southern Yemen had been reunified in the interim, making it possible for the first time to prospect in what had been the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. It thus seemed worthwhile to try again, and the National Geographic Society bravely and imaginatively agreed to fund the attempt.
As we entered the newly painted mafraj, the Land Cruiser crew threw their weapons on to a large and growing pile in the middle of the floor and settled on cushions along the side. The sheikh began to adjudicate disputes among his subjects, and large quantities of qat were passed around. We were evidently in for the long chew, although we had no way of knowing how permanent the sheikh’s hospitality was going to be.
In the end, the occasion was a convivial one, and the young sheikh proved to be highly personable, casually remarking to us (as translated by Jeff) that his family had sacked Sanaa twice, most recently in 1948. As the evening light started to fade and we were beginning to wonder what lay ahead for us, we were graciously ushered on our way, with an invitation to return any time under the sheikh’s protection. Never have I so bitterly regretted not having found a good fossil site. Even the sheikh appeared a little wistful, saying, as Mike recalls in his memoir: “I’m sorry we have too much oil and gold and not enough bones.”
This encounter ended the last major foray of our first exploration of Yemen, and to our great disappointment what we had found had not justified coming back. But a couple of years later we learned through Dr El-Nakhal that the impressions of fossil frogs had been found at Ar Rhyashia, near Rada’, and we were also informed by Scott Rolston, who took over as AIYS Sanaa Resident Director in 1989, that he had discovered part of a dinosaur skeleton near the main road north from Sanaa, just south of Sa’da. What is more, northern and southern Yemen had been reunified in the interim, making it possible for the first time to prospect in what had been the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. It thus seemed worthwhile to try again, and the National Geographic Society bravely and imaginatively agreed to fund the attempt.
Accordingly, and again with the indispensable help of the AIYS and authorization from MOMR, a second field season in the newly unified Republic of Yemen was organized in the fall of 1991. Mike Novacek and Maurice Grolier being unavailable this time around, the field team consisted, in addition to the AMNH’s Ian Tattersall, of the vertebrate paleontologists James Clark of George Washington University, and Peter Whybrow of the British Museum (Natural History) in London.
James Clark and Yemeni colleagues on the frog-bearing outcrop at Ar Rhyashiya.
Slab from Ar Rhyashiya with fossil frog skeleton of the species Xenopus arabiensis.
Part of the slab containing the thalattosuchian crocodilian from Zulma Ba-Thalab.
Our attempts to relocate Scott Rolston’s dinosaur site were not rewarded with success, but despite some stressful circumstances (see below) our visit to Ar Rhyashiaya led to the collection of numerous remarkably well-preserved fossil frog skeleton impressions of probably late Oligocene age. Amy Henrici of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and Ana Maria Baez of the University of Buenos Aires, subsequently described these skeletons as members of a new species of the genus Xenopus, X. arabiensis, and as the first occurrence of the genus in Arabia, subsequent to which the genus had become extinct on the peninsula.
Two areas in southern Yemen were also identified as promising. The first of these was at Zulma Ba-Thalab, north of the road between Aden and Mukallah (see map), where we found a partial skeleton of a late Jurassic teleosaurid thalattosuchian crocodile. Estimated at about 160 million years old, this was the oldest vertebrate fossil yet known from Arabia. Unfortunately, this fossil was found in a slab that had fallen from high on a tall cliff face, so the deposits concerned could not be prospected at the time.
The second promising area was a series of Paleocene localities in the Habshiyah Formation that were exposed in a series of depressions lying perpendicular to the shoreline in the Hadhramawt and Shabwa Governorates, both to the east and to the west of Mukallah. Vertebrate fossils recovered included various fish elements, some dugong ribs and a scapula, and a cetacean rib, and were accompanied by the first fossil flora known from southern Yemen. This flora included internal casts of a magnolid fruit cf. Anona, and fruits tentatively identified as belonging to the cucumber and waterlily families, plus abundant fossil wood. Together, the plant, vertebrate and invertebrate fossils discovered suggest that the facies of the Habshiyah Formation involved was deposited in a near-shore marine environment that interfaced with an onshore tropical rainforest via a marshy and lagoonal shoreline. This setting resembles that inferred for mammal teeth recovered from the late Eocene of southwestern Oman, and is also equivalent in both time and paleoecology to the renowned Eocene-Oligocene Fayum fauna and flora of Egypt.
Localities visited during second field season, 1991
Jim Clark has kindly provided the following personal account of our prospections during the 1991 expedition:
I had the great pleasure of traveling to Yemen with Ian Tattersall and Peter Whybrow from September 29 to October 19, 1991, in search of fossil vertebrates, a trip recounted in Peter's chapter in the book he edited, Travels with the Fossil Hunters. The north and south had only recently been united, and Ian was taking the opportunity to search for fossil human remains, hoping that fossil beds similar to those in Ethiopia that produced “Lucy” were present somewhere in the country.
Peter, from the Natural History Museum in London, was involved because he had found primate fossils in Saudi Arabia, and I was a "hired gun" fossil hunter who usually collected dinosaurs; Mike Novacek had recommended me to Ian after our work together in Mongolia earlier that year, when Mike could not make what would have been his second trip to Yemen.
We were hosted in Saana by the AIYS, which I remember being in a beautiful old building from which my jet lag allowed me to view sunrise over the city. Scott Rolston of the AIYS had found some fossils of what he thought were dinosaurs in the 1980s, and one of our trips was an attempt to try to find his locality. Unfortunately, either his notes or the kilometer signage along the highway were faulty, so we failed to find his site. We were more fortunate in collecting fossil frogs from a locality south of Sanaa, although as Peter describes in his chapter we were less fortunate in being interrogated by local people and essentially held at gunpoint until we paid them a fee for collecting the fossils.
We continued on to the south but never found the fossil humans Ian was hoping for, although we did find some bones of a fossil crocodilian that at that time was the oldest terrestrial vertebrate fossil from Arabia. We had a wonderful stop in Aden which delighted Ian, who grew up in Uganda and was transfixed by the charms of the decayed remnants of the British empire.
I have many memories of the trip – the amazingly reckless driving, the ubiquity of qat and AK47s, our valiant but ultimately futile attempt to find alcohol to drink and acetone to mix our glue in, the great hospitality at the AIYS without which we would have been unable to work, the amazing architecture everywhere we looked, and the beautiful countryside.
I wish the AIYS all the best on its 40th anniversary, it was there for us when we needed it.
Our prospections along the shoreline of southern Yemen indicated that the onshore and near-shore Tertiary deposits became thicker and better-exposed as one moved northeast toward the frontier with Oman; and indeed, in Oman itself similar deposits have yielded vertebrate fossils that are comparable with those in Egypt’s legendary Eocene-Oligocene Fayum deposits. On this basis, we predict that the best prospects Yemen offers for significant Tertiary vertebrate fossil finds lie in the area between Ash Shihr and the Omani border (see map). This is an extremely remote area that we were not equipped to explore in 1991, but that clearly merits future prospection when conditions permit.
We hope that our various accounts make clear how rewarding personally all the participants in the two AMNH expeditions to Yemen found the experience, even though the scientific results were not what one might ideally have wished.
Instructions to guests in our Aden hotel
Our prospections were made possible only through the active support and participation of the AIYS, and its active intercession on our behalf with the Yemeni authorities. AIYS is a nimble organization, able to react rapidly to circumstances as they arise, and able spontaneously to take an imaginative chance, as Jeff Meissner certainly did on more than one occasion. We are deeply grateful to AIYS, and we cannot better conclude this short account by repeating Jim Clark’s words, just quoted:
[We] wish the AIYS all the best on its 40th anniversary, it was there for us when we needed it.
Bibliography
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Grolier, Maurice J. 1988. Geological results of the American Museum of Natural History-National Geographic Society Expedition to the Yemen Arab Republic May 30-June 14, 1988. In: Report on a Preliminary Survey of the Yemen Arab Republic. American Museum of Natural History, submitted to National Geographic Society.
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Henrici, Amy C. and Ana Maria Baez. First occurrence of Xenopus (Anura: Pipidae) on the Arabian Peninsula: A new species from the Upper Oligocene of Yemen. Jour. Paleont. 74 (4): 870-882.
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Maisey, John. 1988. Preliminary report on the fossil fish recovered at Khulaqah, Yemen Arab Republic. In: Report on a Preliminary Survey of the Yemen Arab Republic. American Museum of Natural History, submitted to National Geographic Society.
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Novacek, Michael J. 2002. Time Traveler. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Tattersall, Ian, Michael J. Novacek and Maurice J. Grolier. 1988. Report on a Preliminary Survey of the Yemen Arab Republic. American Museum of Natural History, submitted to National Geographic Society.
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Tattersall, Ian, Clark, James M., and Peter Whybrow. 1995. Paleontological reconnaissance in Yemen. Bull Amer. Inst. Yemeni Studies 37: 21-24.
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Whybrow, Peter. 2000. Arabia Felix: fossilised fruits and the price of frogs. In: Whybrow, P. ed.), Travels with the Fossil Hunters. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196-205.