“May His Memory Be Blessed”

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 345-353

Th e  r u i n s  o f  R u h e i b e h — R e h o v o t in the Negev, located in a remote corner of the Negev desert—are 
an impressive example of the Byzantine-
period “Dead Cities.” Back in the 1980s, 
when Yoram Tsafrir, my teacher and 
mentor at the Hebrew University, began 
excavating in Ruheibeh, revealing its 
churches, buildings, alleys, and water  
 

cisterns, I frequently visited this romantic 
desert site. Ruheibeh could be reached 
only by a four-wheel-drive vehicle on a 
rough dirt road. That was the setting of 
my first encounter with Ken, who joined 
Yoram in the 1986 excavation season. It 
was an interesting combination of Israeli 
and American scholars and students, all 
staying together in an outdoor camp near 
 

RemembeRing Kenneth g. holum  
(1939–2017)

(Photo of Kenneth G. Holum by Juliette Fradin Photography)

Reminiscences by:

Gideon Avni, Israel Antiquities Authority and Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

Elizabeth Conner, University of Maryland

Alan Walmsley, Macquarie University



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 346

the site. Ken, then a young professor 
of classical history at the University of 
Maryland, headed the American team. 

As a young Israeli archaeologist at the 
time, I had a very clear stereotype about 
how a distinguished American professor 
of history should look and behave in the 
unwelcoming conditions of the Negev 
desert, with its intensive summer heat 
and occasional bursts of dusty winds. To 
my great surprise, however, I found Ken to 
be the absolute opposite of my predicted 
images. It was clear from first sight that 
he was not an ordinary academic with 
an urban educational background but 
rather well acquainted with open-air 
surroundings, outstandingly familiar with 
harsh desert conditions, and even enjoying 
living in a tent in the middle of nowhere. I 
was specifically impressed by Ken’s great 
abilities in outdoors camping, equipped 
w i t h  h i s  s o p h i s t i c a t e d  S w i s s  A r m y 
pocketknife always in his immediate reach. 

Ken was helpful in solving all kinds 
of practical difficulties in the camp, very 
much attached to his students and taking 
care of every detail of their unique desert 
experience. The tall figure of Ken with 
his perennial smile and good humor, 
s u r r o u n d e d  b y  h i s  y o u n g  A m e r i c a n 
students and knowing precisely his way 
in the desert and within the ruins of 
Ruheibeh, is still vivid in my mind after all 
these years. Only years later did I discover 
where all this knowledge originated, 
as I listened to Ken’s stories about his 
childhood on a farm in the prairies of 
South Dakota, a descendant of Norwegian 
immigrants who settled in the American 
West, living in conditions that were not so 
much different from those in the Negev 
camp.

Another thing that impressed me deeply 
during the excavations at Ruheibeh was 
the deep friendship that had developed 
between Ken and Yoram Tsafrir, as if 
springing from the bottom of their hearts. 
This long-lasting friendship was further 
strengthened when Ken spent a sabbatical 
at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 
Jerusalem and when Yoram was a fellow at 
Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. 

Looking back, I believe that this was 
one of Ken’s great qualities—the ability to 
make true and long-term friendships with 
colleagues. In his many years of excavations 
in Israel he forged such relationships many 
times: first with Yoram and then with 
Avner Raban from Haifa University, Ken’s 
partner in the excavations at Caesarea 
Maritima. Ken’s experience in Caesarea 
began in 1978, when he was a member of 
the Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima 
(JECM), headed by R. B. Bull on behalf of 
the American School of Oriental Research, 
with the participation of twenty-two 
colleges, seminars, and universities in the 
United States and Canada. Ken was part of 
the Caesarea excavations from 1978 until 
his last years, and the study of the capital 
of Palestine Prima in Roman and Byzantine 
times became one of his primary interests. 
He excavated with JECM between 1978 and 
1984, and later, between 1989 and 2004, 
he co-headed, together with Avner Raban 
and Joseph Patrich, the Combined Caesarea 
Excavations (CCE), as a joint project of 
the University of Maryland and Haifa 
University. 

Ken also directed the excavations at 
the Temple Platform and the warehouse 
quarter north of the Inner Harbor, while 
Avner Raban headed the Inner Harbor 
excavations and those in other areas to the  
 



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 347

south. The Temple Platform excavations 
proved to be a meticulous enterprise, as the 
different phases of the Roman temple, the 
octagonal Byzantine church, the invisible 
early Islamic mosque, and the Crusader 
church revealed a stratigraphic nightmare 
for archaeologists. But Ken, although he 
was first and foremost a historian of the 
Byzantine period, proved to be an excellent 
archaeologist as well. For years he invested 
all his efforts in deciphering the phases of 
building and development of this unique 
complex. In his preliminary publications 
of the excavations he succeeded in the 
interpretation of the transformation from 
temple to church, one of the very few such 
cases in Roman and Byzantine Palestine.

This multiyear project, which revealed 
some of the most important complexes 
of Caesarea that demonstrated the long 
sequence in the city’s history from the 
early Roman period to early Islamic and 
Crusader times, was the height of Ken’s 
archaeological work in Israel. It would 
be no exaggeration to say that Ken was 
falling in love with Caesarea. In 1988 
he participated in mounting a major 
exhibition on the city and its history, 
named, after its founder, “King Herod’s 
Dream.” It seems that this was one of the 
outcomes of the “love affair” between a 
scholar of history and archaeology and the 
capital of Roman and Byzantine Palestine.

The long friendship between Ken and 
Avner Raban also proved very fruitful in 
terms of publications, featuring articles 
a n d  a r c h a e o l o g i c a l  r e p o r t s ,  a m o n g 
them Ken’s initiative of the series of 
“ C a e s a r e a  P a p e r s ”  i n  t h e  J o u r n a l  o f 
Roman Archaeology supplements. These 
d e t a i l e d  a r c h a e o l o g i c a l  r e p o r t s  a n d 
scientific publications, including Ken’s 
interpretations of Caesarea’s economy and 

society in Late Antiquity, constitute one of 
the finest examples of a detailed evaluation 
of a major city on the Mediterranean coast.

Ken’s love for Caesarea continued 
during his last decade. After ending his 
excavations at the Temple Platform, 
he continued to visit the site annually, 
working on the publication of the final 
reports and advising the young generation 
of Israeli archaeologists. His open mind 
and good spirits led him to foster another 
collaboration, this time with the Israel 
Antiquities Authority (IAA) expedition 
at Caesarea, headed first by Joseph Porat 
and in recent years by Peter Gendelman, 
who continued to excavate the vaults 
beneath the Temple Platform. Ken’s last 
visit to Caesarea took place in 2016, when 
he spent several days with Peter and his 
staff, discussing stratigraphic questions 
following their latest excavation at the site. 
It was a joy to follow these consultations, 
in which, once again, Ken’s great mind and 
open heart were so vividly expressed.

K e n  w a s  p r i m a r i l y  a  h i s t o r i a n , 
m u c h  i n t e r e s t e d  i n  a r c h a e o l o g y  a n d 
material culture but not trained as an 
a r c h a e o l o g i s t .  N e v e r t h e l e s s ,  h e  w a s 
devoted to archaeological fieldwork and 
interpretation, spent time and effort to 
study these new fields, and became a very 
fine and qualified archaeologist.

Some years after our first encounter in 
Ruheibeh, I met Ken and Marsha during 
their sabbatical year in Jerusalem, when 
Ken joined the research group at the 
Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at the 
Hebrew University. This group, organized 
by Yoram Tsafrir, focused on the cities of 
Palestine in Late Antiquity, following the 
large-scale excavations in Scythopolis-
B a y s a n  a n d  C a e s a r e a .  T h e  m e e t i n g s 
included a weekly seminar in Jerusalem 



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 348

and occasional tours to archaeological 
sites throughout the country, providing 
an excellent opportunity to get acquainted 
with Ken’s vast knowledge of the relevant 
historical background. This combination of 
deep knowledge of historical sources and 
practical archaeological experience was 
unique among the scholars. The addition 
of Ken’s good humor and friendliness, 
together with his common sense and 
practical abilities, established him as one 
of the main “pillars” of the IAS group. 

M y  f r i e n d s h i p  a n d  i n t e r a c t i o n s 
w i t h  K e n  a n d  M a r s h a  b e c a m e  m o r e 
significant in the last years, when they 
spent their summer terms in Jerusalem. 
Ken was working on the publications of 
the Caesarea excavations, and Marsha 
spent her time at the National Library 
at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew 
University, working on her research on 
modern Jewish history. We would meet 
in the morning or late afternoon at their 
modest B&B behind the central Jerusalem 
bus station. Ken and Marsha became good 
friends with the Jerusalemite owner of the 
B&B, and apparently both sides were very 
pleased with and looking forward to these 
summer encounters. In our meetings, we 
spent lovely times talking about what 
was new in archaeology here and there, 
and then touring the excavations in and 
around Jerusalem together. As usual, Ken 
was very enthusiastic and full of new 
ideas and knowledge on whatever he was 
looking at. Exploring new excavations in 
Jerusalem, he would make the connections 
and present the “big picture” of whatever 
was exposed in the corners of the Old City. 

Over the years I also had the privilege 
of meeting Ken and Marsha at their house 
in Silver Spring during my occasional visits 
to Washington, DC, and I especially recall 

their warm and welcoming hospitality. 
This was  the time, many years after our 
first encounter in Ruheibeh, that I learned 
about Ken’s years as a child and young 
adult on the family farm in South Dakota. 
In these encounters I also heard about 
Ken’s early years as a student in the big 
city, the change he experienced when he 
became attached to a young Jewish lady 
(Marsha), and his gradual absorption into 
the world of Judaism. The good humor that 
emanated from his stories and experiences 
triggered bursts of laughter: just imagine 
a nice protestant farm boy of Norwegian 
origin becoming a prominent member 
of the Jewish community in Maryland! 
In the vocabulary of his acquired Jewish 
tradition, Ken was first and foremost a 
“mensch”—a true human being with a 
big heart open to the world and to all his 
friends and fellows. As is customary to say 
in the Jewish tradition: may his memory be 
blessed,                       .

— Gideon Avni

It is my great honor to write about my dear doctoral adviser, my Doktorvater—as the Germans still say today—and my 
friend and mentor, Ken Holum. It seems 
fitting to begin with the proemium with 
which Choricius of Gaza, a teacher of 
rhetoric who flourished in the mid-sixth-
century city of Gaza in Roman Palestine, 
dedicated his funeral oration to his beloved 
mentor, Procopius:

The oration laments the fact that we 
have the necessity for a speech of this 
kind; for it [the oration] honors the 
funeral rites of my deceased teacher, 
offering him this repayment insofar 
as it is possible.

יהי זכרו ברוך



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 349

L i k e  C h o r i c i u s ,  I  h a v e  n o  d o u b t 
about the impossibility of repaying my 
Doktorvater for all that he has given me 
over the years. As ancient rhetoricians 
o f  t h e  G r e e k  t r a d i t i o n  w e r e  f o n d  o f 
observing, experience, like the world of 
sense of perception, will always exhaust 
the capacity of speech. 

M y  r e l a t i o n s h i p  w i t h  K e n  H o l u m 
spanned almost half of my life and was 
one of the most important relationships 
of my life. As a means of expressing 
some small measure of my gratitude to 
this very dear friend, I wish to speak 
about his work as a highly influential 
and wide-ranging scholar, a cherished 
teacher of undergraduate and graduate 
students alike, and an outstanding and 
irreplaceable mentor to graduate students. 
My Doktorvater was a rare combination 
of prolific scholar and truly kind human 
being. 

Ken was an unusual scholar. He was 
unusual because he was both an excellent 
philologist, particularly in the study of late 
antique Greek, and a highly accomplished 
archaeologist. Ken’s first book, Theodosian 
Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion 
in Late Antiquity, a pioneering study 
of women and dynastic politics in the 
fifth century CE, remains a foundational 
analysis of the construction of imperial 
authority through the person of the 
empress. For more than thirty years, Ken 
was one of the leading archaeologists of 
the Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima 
in northern Israel. He published multiple 
excavation reports of his findings and was 
still writing a final volume of these reports 
with steady care when he became sick in 
February 2017. Ken also endeavored to 
make the site accessible to a more popular 
audience, coauthoring a popular history 

of the site with colleagues, contributing to 
articles on Caesarea in popular publications 
such as National Geographic, organizing 
exhibits at the Smithsonian, and appearing 
on programs on the site that aired on the 
Discovery Channel. His genuinely kind and 
gentle ways made his engagement with the 
interested public all the more successful. 

Ken’s amazing mastery of the ancient 
languages—as well as his remarkable 
facility with German—was thoroughly 
impressive to me as a graduate student 
who met with him weekly to translate 
hitherto untranslated late antique Greek 
letters from Gaza. More on this shortly. 
My Doktorvater had first learned Greek 
and Latin from German philologists in 
German—no small undertaking—while 
working for several years in Munich in the 
mid and late 1960s. 

Ken’s breadth as a historian of the 
sub-epochs of the Ancient Mediterranean 
was also remarkable. He was as comfort-
able teaching and speaking about classical 
G r e e c e  o r  i m p e r i a l  R o m e  a s  h e  w a s 
teaching and discussing his specialty, Late 
Antiquity. Strong as his technical skills in 
the ancillary disciplines of ancient history 
were, Ken was keen to deconstruct for his 
students many of the received scholarly 
categories set by some of the leading 
figures who, alongside Ken himself, had 
been pivotal in developing the academic 
field of Late Antiquity. In my experience, 
this interpretive caution, particularly in 
the study of the triumph of Christianity 
in the Roman Empire, distinguished my 
adviser from many of the early architects 
of our field. 

Following his relatively recent illness 
and up until his illness and afterward, 
Ken continued to be as active a scholar as 
ever, writing the archaeological reports 



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 350

for Caesarea, articles, and book reviews 
and advising his eager gaggle of advanced 
graduate students. 

K e n  w a s  d e v o t e d  t o  h i s  s c h o l a r l y 
community of specialists working on Late 
Antiquity and the Ancient Mediterranean, 
and to scholars at all career stages as well as 
independent scholars and researchers. As a 
senior scholar, Ken was a most supportive 
adviser to younger colleagues. When I 
was a teaching fellow at the University 
of Tübingen in Germany (2017–18) in the 
Seminar für alte Geschichte, I learned in 
the course of several conversations with 
Aaron Johnson, a rising star in our field who 
spent the summer of 2017 in the Theology 
Seminar at Tübingen, that my mentor 
had played a key role in helping Aaron 
develop his first book and his approach to 
his sources. Aaron’s description of his long 
discussions with Ken at Dumbarton Oaks 
was vividly reminiscent of my experience 
with my Doktorvater, and his recounting 
of this story about Ken—who was already 
quite ill by this point in mid-July—made 
it feel as though he were present with us 
on those hot, air-conditionless days in the 
Swabian summer sun.

Ken loved teaching, and he especially 
loved working with his graduate students. 
I remember most fondly my years as his 
teaching assistant, impressed by Ken’s 
clarity as  a lecturer, the concept ual 
a p p a r a t u s  u n d e r g i r d i n g  e a c h  o f  h i s 
courses, his beautiful slideshows filled 
with his own pictures of various sites and 
antiquities, and his warmth and genuine 
respect for his students. Ken’s courses 
demonstrated to students that the study 
of classical history contributed to the 
development of cognitive toolkits that had 
use in the interrogation of information  
 

i n  e v e r y d a y  l i f e .  M i l i t a t i n g  a g a i n s t 
“alternative facts,” Ken taught that not 
all arguments are equal. In my mentor’s 
classroom, the classical world was shown 
to be vibrantly alive in our living culture 
and institutions. In courses such as his 
“Athens as the Mirror of Democracy,” 
students used the organization of radical 
democracy in classical Athens to examine 
their expectations and assumptions about 
their own representative democracy. 

I began to learn to teach by watching 
K e n  t e a c h  a n d  b y  w o r k i n g  a s  h i s 
apprentice. For years, he mentored me in 
how to teach, guiding me through various 
situations—the dreaded plagiarism of 
Wikipedia entries on the assigned book!—
and teaching me how to lecture and how 
to teach students to read and understand 
ancient texts in translation. I was always 
asking for all sorts of advice, on my work 
and my teaching, and I feel and will always 
continue to feel the loss of this mentorship. 
I know it was a mentorship that was his 
great joy to give, a mentorship that he 
would never abandon, a mentorship whose 
values and lessons I will always carry with 
me. I will be looking for this mentorship 
and friendship the rest of my life, and it 
will never be replaced.

Ken was an irreplaceable adviser and 
teacher of graduate students. All members 
of my cohort will fondly recall our graduate 
seminars, which took place weekly in Ken 
and Marsha’s dining room, the participants 
seated around the table, often nibbling on 
delicious cookies Marsha had baked. These 
lively sessions were always so exciting to 
me. I remember vividly how energized and 
exhilarated I left these discussions, unable 
to quiet my mind, flipping back through 
various issues the rest of the night, 
  



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 351

perceiving how my thinking was changing, 
and drawing immense pleasure from the 
experience. 

But the highlight of my week for years 
and the cornerstone of my graduate work 
with my Doktorvater was our weekly 
translation meeting. We met for a couple 
hours a week to read very challenging 
Greek texts, and, to my knowledge, we 
were the first to translate these texts 
i n t o  E n g l i s h .  T h e  t e x t s  w e  r e a d — a 
couple hundred virtually ignored Greek 
letters written by late antique teachers 
of rhetoric in Roman Palestine—were 
a study of intellectual friendships and 
mentoring relationships between teachers 
and students in the late ancient Greek 
East. These letters are compact gifts of 
antiquarian erudition, which showcase, 
in particular, the art of constructing 
expressions of intimacy and friendship in 
the language of classical texts. We spent 
long hours meditating about the nature 
of the relationship between teacher and 
student, trying to unpack the classical 
models of this most important relationship 
as expressed in late antique letters. 

The letters were an ancient mirror of 
the remarkable relationship between 
m e n t o r  a n d  a d v i s e e .  T h e y  o f f e r e d  a 
familiar yet different series of registers to 
represent this intellectual friendship and 
virtual parental relationship. Not unlike 
the adoptive intellectual families created 
and the kinship language used to depict 
intellectual friendships in early modern 
European literati circles, in the rhetorical 
c u l t u r e  o f  l a t e  a n t i q u i t y ,  t e a c h e r s 
considered themselves fathers to their 
adopted children, their students. The term  
Doktorvater, in my eyes, is thus an ancient 
usage.

I learned the love of sources—which is  
the heart of philology—from Ken. Ken 
loved reading Greek aloud and puzzling 
t h r o u g h  t h e  c o n s t r u c t i o n s .  F o r  h i m , 
such activity was sheer joy. But what we 
both loved most was putting the letter 
back together again after applying the 
translator’s razor. What were we really 
looking at? How was a given text a source? 
For what was it a source? These were 
wonderful conversations; they constituted 
the art of doing history. 

In my estimation, such experiences are 
highly unusual among advisees. It seems 
rare to find such a devoted mentor who 
would give such individualized attention 
to a student, every week offering her 
a workshop on philology and source 
criticism. Upon graduating, I mourned the 
loss of these regular sessions, although 
Ken and I continued to read amazingly rich 
texts from late antique Gaza up until the 
month before I left for Germany. 

I am deeply grateful for the time and 
training my Doktorvater has given me 
these many years. But above all I am 
grateful for Ken’s loving support and 
kindness, which provided such a positive 
context for learning and growth. From my 
earliest acquaintance with my mentor, 
his learning combined with his faith in 
my ability inspired me to do my very best 
work for him. I never wanted to let down 
this most kind and learned friend.  

I grieve for this loss. Thank you, my 
dear Doktorvater, for all you have given 
me. Thank you for our walks through 
ancient Attic meadows. You are missed, 
and we will always miss you.

— Elizabeth Conner 



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 352

Middle Eastern archaeology can b o a s t  o f  o n l y  t h e  o c c a s i o n a l p r o t a g o n i s t  o f  t h e  h i g h e s t 
standing, unlike the many professed 
archaeologists of mediocrity or, every so 
often, infamy drawn to the region in the 
past. Not only does Ken Holum indisput-
ably belong at the top of the protagonist 
 category; he was also a great bloke. He 
stood in stark contrast to his peers and, 
empowered with a questioning mind and 
unshackled thinking, confronted head-on 
the rigid opinions assumed to be true by 
his colleagues. My introduction to Ken 
was through his scholarship, most notably 
through his pioneering work at Caesarea 
M a r i t i m a  ( Q a y s ā r i y y a t  a l - S h ā m ) ,  t h e 
onetime capital of Byzantine Palaestina 
Prima and a district center of early Islamic 
Filasṭīn. Caesarea was no inconsequen-
tial town. Located on the Mediterranean 
coast, its administrative and commercial 
strengths gathered people and attracted 
investment through much of the first 
millennium CE, and it was thus an ideal 
case study on the evolving social and 
economic conditions of Palaestina/Filasṭīn 
during one of the most important periods 
in the history of the east Mediterranean.

E a r l y  e x c a v a t i o n s  b y  t h e  J o i n t 
Expedition to Caesarea Maritima during 
the 1970s and 1980s took as read existing 
assumptions on occupational profiles at 
the site in the lead-up to and following the 
arrival of Islam, then viewed negatively as 
a catastrophic and fatal rupture point in 
history. Publications of the Joint Expedition 
in the 1970s state that the excavations 
uncovered destruction levels interpreted as 
caused by early seventh-century CE attacks 
by the Sasanids and, after them, a Muslim 
siege and conquest. Absolutist terms, such 
as “complete” and “irretrievable,” were 

readily applied to the supposed fate of 
Caesarea, with “permanent desolation” the 
outcome. This view was widespread among 
archaeologists in the 1970s, yet it stood in 
stark contrast to that held by historians 
of Islam, which caused great reputational 
damage to archaeology among historical 
studies. At first, by his own admission, 
K e n  w a s  p a r t y  t o  t h i s  d i s i n g e n u o u s 
interpretation of Caesarea’s history, but 
by the 1980s significant doubt as to the 
validity of this view began to appear in a 
number of Ken’s publications, culminating 
in his ground-breaking BASOR publication 
of 1992 entitled “Archaeological Evidence 
for the Fall of Byzantine Caesarea.” It was 
a remarkable, courageous, and timely 
turnaround by a senior member of the Joint 
Expedition that not only put Caesarea in a 
new light but also had wider consequences 
for understanding the archaeological 
reading of sites in the mid-first millennium 
CE.

Just about everyone trying to unravel 
the complexities of late antique and 
early Islamic history and archaeology 
in the region suddenly took note of the 
Caesarea discoveries. In my case, having 
already uncovered contrary evidence to 
unchallenged paradigms while excavating 
an extensive late antique/early Islamic 
residential quarter at Pella (Ṭabaqat 
Faḥl) in Jordan (1979–82), Ken’s paper 
was a revelation; here was a significant, 
y e t  p o l i t i c a l l y  c h a r g e d ,  q u e s t i o n i n g 
and rebuttal of a prevailing narrative 
widely accepted in the archaeological 
e s t a b l i s h m e n t  o n  t h e  n a t u r e  o f  t h e 
Muslim takeover of Caesarea and the 
consequences of that occupation on the 
town and its people. More personally, Ken 
freely acknowledged the insufficiency of 
earlier uncritical views adopted by the 



Remembering Kenneth G. Holum

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 353

Joint Expedition to which he had initially 
contributed, drawing on historical sources 
to question them while introducing into 
his rebuttal fresh archaeological evidence 
f r o m  C a e s a r e a ,  i n c l u d i n g  i m p o r t a n t 
material compiled by Cherie Lenzen for her 
1983 doctoral thesis at Drew University. 

Archaeological interpretations are 
usually easy to dispute because of the 
inherent intricacies and, on the face 
o f  i t ,  o f t e n  c o n f l i c t i n g  o u t c o m e s  o f 
archaeological research. However, while 
demolition is easy, building an alternative 
explanation is notoriously difficult and 
t i m e - c o n s u m i n g .  K e n ’ s  r e s e a r c h  a n d 
publications into the 2010s sought new 
ways of understanding under the banner 
of “transitions,” a concept prominent in 
late antique and early Islamic studies of 
the east Mediterranean since the 1990s. 
On occasions our paths crossed, and his 
openness and friendly disposition were 
immediately apparent, but it was not until 

a two-day conference hosted in April 2005 
by Ken and Hayim Lapin at the University 
of Maryland that I witnessed first-hand 
Ken’s deep understanding of the period 
and the breadth of his scholarship (the 
University of Maryland’s library record of 
the conference publication lists more than 
twenty subject keywords in English alone, 
from ethnicity to antiquities). In the “who’s 
who” of scholars Ken gathered for the 
occasion, such as Oleg Grabar, Irfan Shahîd, 
Sidney H. Griffith, Donald Whitcomb, 
and Gideon Avni, Ken’s eclecticism was 
on full display, with papers addressing, 
as one catalog keyword defines it, the 
“intercultural communication” of the time, 
as different religious, ethnic, and cultural 
elements forged new understandings of 
their socially diverse world. Yes, his reach 
was wide, and his scholarship progressive: 
Ken Holum was, indisputably, a scholar of 
great distinction. 

— Alan Walmsley