James A. Sauer

Overview

James A. Sauer (1945 to 1999) was an American archaeologist of Jordan and Arabia, and a specialist in the pottery by which excavated levels are dated. He directed the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman from 1975 to 1981 and was president of the board of the American Schools of Oriental Research from 1982 to 1988.

Academic Career

Sauer studied at Concordia College and took his doctorate at Harvard in 1973. His pottery chronology for Transjordan was built largely on his work at Tell Hesban. He taught and served as a museum curator at the University of Pennsylvania, and was later a curator and research associate at Harvard's Semitic Museum.

The Pishon Identification

In "The River Runs Dry", published in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1996, Sauer argued that the Pishon of Genesis 2 was a real river that once flowed across Arabia and has since dried up. Drawing on the geologist Farouk El-Baz's study of satellite imagery, which traced an ancient river system along the Wadi al-Batin toward the head of the Persian Gulf, he identified that system as the Pishon, and linked its upper reaches toward the gold-bearing region of Mahd adh-Dhahab with the gold of Havilah. He dated the river's drying to between about 3500 and 2000 BC, and concluded that the biblical description preserves a genuine memory of the region's geography. The identification remains a proposal: it was not tested by excavation, and later writers have treated it as tentative.