SOUTHWEST REGIONAL ASOR MEETING REPORT
By Eric Mitchell, President, ASOR-SW
The annual spring meeting of the Southwest Regional ASOR took place at the Southwest Commission of Religious Studies (SWCRS) in Dallas, TX on March 9-10, 2013. SWCRS is a joint meeting sponsored by southwest regional AAR/SBL/ASSR/ASOR. Eight ASOR members and eleven student ASOR members presented papers in five sessions (New Testament Archaeology, Iron Age Archaeology, Excavation Reports, Archaeology in Text and Classroom, and a Special Joint ASOR/SBL session). The student papers were presented in the main by PhD and Master’s students from the Tandy Institute of Archaeology at Southwestern Seminary, with one paper from a Baylor University doctoral student. The average attendance for our sessions was twenty six. Our annual joint ASOR/SBL session had thirty four in attendance for two papers: Steve Ortiz (The Tandy Institute) presented the ASOR paper Archaeology and the Gospels: Recent Trends and Research and William Warren (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) presented the SBL paper Text Criticism and the Gospels: Recent Trends and Research.
Our annual Eisenbrauns Student Paper Award was won by R. Adam Dodd, a doctoral student at Southwestern Seminary. Southwest Regional members voted to plan an Archaeology and History of the Second Temple conference for our 2014 regional meetings to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the SWCRS and our participation therein. During the meeting, the SWCRS board of directors elected Steve Ortiz to be the SWCRS vice-president; he will then be president for the year following.