BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Milestones: Patricia Maynor Bikai (1943–2025)

Wide-ranging archaeologist who specialized in Petra

@CR: Courtesy American Center of Research.

Archaeologist Patricia Maynor Bikai was involved for more than four decades in field projects in Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, and most intensely in Jordan. She moved to Amman in 1991 when her husband Pierre Bikai became the director of the American Center of Research (ACOR). She took on many roles in their 15 years in Amman, including ACOR Associate Director, which allowed her to oversee some of the center’s most important excavation, restoration, and publication projects.

Pierre and Patricia met in 1970 when she went to Lebanon to participate in the University of Pennsylvania excavations at Sarafand (biblical Sarepta) under James B. Pritchard. Pierre was the architect for the American project and also was the field manager of the Lebanese excavations at Tyre. During the Sarafand excavations, they became good friends of Artemis and Martha Joukowsky and would remain so, with close ties in Jordan. In 1972, the Bikais were married in Tyre in the 18th-century Church of St. Thomas, which lies above the Crusader church that she had excavated. As a field archaeologist for the Tyre excavations, she meticulously documented the site’s complex ceramic sequence from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age (c. 2750 to 700 BCE). This work led to her publication The Pottery of Tyre (Aris & Phillips, 1978), which remains a significant reference tool.

Patricia and Pierre left Tyre in 1975 due to the Lebanese civil war and moved to California. Patricia had studied at Santa Clara University for her bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s in biblical studies from the University of San Francisco. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. in biblical archaeology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. In the 1980s, her research focus was on the Phoenicians and Cyprus, where she had a Fulbright fellowship (1984–1985) to analyze and publish Phoenician pottery found on the island (Nicosia: Leventis, 1987).

From 1991 to 2006, the Bikais, while running ACOR, undertook myriad projects in Jordan—excavation, restoration, and conservation, as well as important publications. Patricia initiated ACOR’s major monograph series and was the editor for the 1992 volume, The Mosaics of Jordan, authored by Father Michele Piccirillo (d. 2008). This invaluable tome provides extensive illustrations and insights into the floor decoration of many Byzantine churches in the country. Ironically, the wonderful mosaics discovered during ACOR’s excavations in what came to be called the Petra Church were not included, as they were just being uncovered in 1992–1993.

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Again thanks to Patricia, the multi-authored comprehensive volume The Petra Church (ACOR, 2001) covers the results of those 1990s excavations in great detail. She provided insights into the recreation of the opus sectile floor in the nave, a project she undertook, as well as other conservation efforts and the building of a shelter to protect the church. Under her editorship, the first of five volumes on The Petra Papyri came out in 2002 and set the tone for the ensuing volumes in which the fragile sixth-century papyri scrolls, primarily written in Greek and found in the church, were presented by numerous specialists.

Shelters were a concern for the Bikais, and ACOR’s work in Madaba in the 1990s resulted in the protection of several buildings. ACOR also undertook major work in Amman, including excavation of the so-called Temple of Hercules on the Amman Citadel and the resurrection of the columns there, now an iconic image for Amman. That project and so many others were funded by USAID, which also supported upgrades to ACOR’s own building over the years, such as a conservation lab in which the objects uncovered in excavations were treated.

In 1994, Patricia turned her attention to the area on the hillside above the Petra Church and there excavated the North Ridge Church and then below it the Blue Chapel, which was restored in 2002 under her guidance. Her last major publication was Petra: The North Ridge (ACOR, 2020), co-authored with Megan Perry and Chrysanthos Kanellopoulos, close colleagues involved in the excavation and documentation of work in the Petra Park. She initiated a project in Bayda in 2005, uncovering an amazing cache of architectural sculptures within a building that may have been a Nabatean royal banqueting hall. Objects from these various Petra excavations are now on display in the Jordan Museum in downtown Amman and the Petra Museum near the visitor center. Some of her later field work was done after the Bikais moved to Aqaba in 2006. Pierre and Patricia lived there until 2011, when they returned to California and settled in Emeryville with a view of the San Francisco Bay.

At the time of her retirement from ACOR, Patricia was awarded the Al Hussein Medal for Distinguished Service of the Second Order by H.M. King Abdullah II. Her efforts in protecting the heritage of Jordan were manifested in many ways and this award was very well deserved. Generations of scholars who work in the region came through the doors of ACOR and the Bikais helped many of them. For those efforts, they will long be remembered by those for whom ACOR became a special place. When I moved to Jordan in 2006 to become Pierre’s successor, the Bikais generously welcomed me. I was well aware then and now of all that Patricia had accomplished and will always admire her tenacity and passion for archaeology, but equally her abiding loyalty to friends and family.

Barbara A. Porter is the former director of the American Center of Research (2006–2020) in Amman, Jordan. Previously, she served as an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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