Introduction to the Barbara A. Porter Collection 

Today, Dr. Barbara A. Porter is the ACOR Ambassador, the first and only person to be awarded this title, in honor of her deep commitment to the American Center of Research, where she served as director from 2006 to March 2020.

By the time she became director, her experience in the region had already stretched back decades, into her childhood. She lived in Lebanon from 1965 to 1970, an experience that greatly influenced her passion for archaeology.

She went on to receive her master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University, served as a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curatorial staff, and taught at New York University.

In 1977 she was invited to excavate in the Jordan Valley, and during that time she resided at the very center that, almost three decades later, she would guide for fourteen years. Under her leadership, the American Center of Oriental Research (as the American Center of Research was then known) was a beacon of stability and underwent a period of growth that prepared it for the new era of global interconnectivity we experience today. 

One of the many projects of Dr. Porter’s tenure was the ACOR Photo Archive, launched in 2016 with support from a four-year American Overseas Research Centers (AORC) Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Now known as the ACOR Digital Archive, it would come to include among its substantial holdings thousands of photographs taken by Dr. Porter herself and by her parents, Dwight J. and Adele Porter.

Besides her work in museum galleries, university classrooms, and the American Center, Dr. Porter has led tours throughout the region. Travels have taken her to Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tunisia, Iran, and Libya, and she documented with her camera what she saw. (The proportion of her collection representing each of these countries is represented by the graph below.)

The subjects encompass not only archaeological sites and objects in museums but also ethnography—the daily modern life going on around the sites and in the cities and towns she visited. Souks and mosques, mosaics and tiles, doorways and columns, food vendors and tourists all attracted her lens.