Syria's Ali Sharif Amrir speaks on the Levant's first farmers at ACOR in Amman on 26 October

Prof. Dr. Ali Sharif Amrir, Al Furat University's vice president for scientific research and postgraduate studies in Deir ez-Zor, Syria, gives this year's Professor Thomas W. Davis Annual Lecture at the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Amman on Monday 26 October 2026. His subject is "The First Agricultural Communities in the Levant". ACOR announced the lecture on 18 October.

Amrir speaks in Arabic, and an English translation is available in the hall and online. The talk starts at 6 p.m. in Amman, 11 a.m. in New York. Those who cannot be in Amman can join on Zoom (webinar ID 891 8387 9663, passcode 066195) or watch the stream on ACOR's YouTube channel. The Zoom link and directions to the centre are on ACOR's event page.

The lecture and its namesake

ACOR's board of trustees created the annual lecture in 2025 in honour of Thomas W. Davis (1956–2025), a trustee from 2020 to 2025 who chaired the centre's Publications Committee. Prof. Dr. Anas Haj Zeidan, director general of Syria's Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, gave the first one in Amman on 14 December 2025, on the illicit trade in Syrian cultural property and the problems of restitution.

Davis began his fieldwork on Cyprus. He came to Kourion in 1984 to dig for David Soren and led the small team that went on to excavate the late Roman Earthquake House. He described his later Kourion Urban Space Project as a direct outgrowth of that dig. In 1989 he published "A History of American Archaeology on Cyprus", and from 2003 to 2011 he directed the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia.

The Levant's first farmers and Cyprus

The lecture's subject reaches the island directly. From around 8400 BCE, in the phase called the Cypro-PPNB (the Cypriot variant of the mainland Pre-Pottery Neolithic B), a founding group of farmers and herders from the northern Levant appears to have settled Cyprus, which already had inhabitants. They brought emmer, einkorn and hulled barley, lentils and peas, and sheep, goat, cattle and pig, as the animal bones from Parekklisha-Shillourokambos show. Their villages of round buildings, at Shillourokambos, Kalavasos-Tenta and later Khirokitia, belong to the Neolithic sequence of the island, which runs from about 9000 to 3900 BCE.