Archaeology_as_Cultural_Survival_The_Future_of_the_Palestinian_Past.pdf

Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian PastAuthor(s): Albert GlockSource: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1994), pp. 70-84Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2537961 .

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ARCHAEOLOGY AS CULTURAL SURVIVAL: THE FUTURE OF

THE PALESTINIAN PAST ALBERT GLOCK

Palestine has almost unlimited cultural resources, much, but not all, preserved underground. The method by which this resource is uncovered and made available is summed up in the term "archaeology," an academic discipline that begins with the systematic excavation of the primary data that often reflect the thought and action of ancestors. All over the world this non-

Albert Glock, an American archaeologist and educator who was killed by an unidentified gunman in Birzeit, the West Bank, on 19 January 1992, wrote this essay in 1990. The editors feel it has special relevance today, as the Palestinians look toward regaining control of their cultural heritage in the wake of the signing of the 13 September 1993 Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles. The importance of archaeology in the conflict was dramatically brought home in the last half of November and early December when Israeli archaeologists launched "Operation Scroll," searching the West Bank for artifacts in anticipation of some withdrawal in the occupied territories.

Dr. Glock spent seventeen years in Jerusalem and the West Bank, first as director of the Albright Institute for Archaeology and then as head of the archaeology department of Birzeit University, where he helped found the Archaeology Institute.

A brief review of the known facts connected with his unsolved murder is in order. Dr. Glock was shot at close range (twice in the back of the head and neck and once in the heart from the front) by a masked man using an Israeli army gun who was driven away in a car with Israeli license plates. It took the Israeli authorities, who were nearby, three hours to get to the scene. Apart from giving a ten- minute statement, Dr. Glock's widow was never asked about his activities, entries in his diary, possible enemies, and so on. The lack of Israeli investigation into the murder of an American citizen is perhaps the most unusual feature of the case.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), meanwhile, established a committee composed of several factions to look into the death of the man who had spent years helping Palestinians develop their archaeology. Individuals close to the case have said that the confidential PLO report lacks credibility and appears designed to vindicate a suspect in the case, a Palestinian whose employment in Birzeit's archaeology department had been blocked by Dr. Glock.

Finally, the U.S. authorities, including the FBI, have not responded to repeated requests by the Glock family to look into the assassination or to ask the Israelis to do so. Prospects for solving the case thus appear remote.

Journal of Palestine Studies XXIII, no. 3 (Spring 1994), pp. 70-84.



PALESTINIAN ARCHAEOLOGY 71

renewable resource is controlled and protected by the governments as public property, because it documents the past lifeways of the descendant population. In a word, it tells the story of the country.

At least four forces have contributed to the predominant version of the Palestine story today. First, the biblical tradition, as interpreted by Western Christian nations to educate their youth in the Judeo-Christian heritage, which has shaped the canonical Palestine story for the Anglo-American and European world. Second, European rivalry for control of the Levant in general and Palestine in particular, which generated a considerable knowledge of the land in order to serve Western military, economic, and cultural needs; the data gathered to this end have been used to amplify the canonical story. Third, the calculated decimation of the native Palestinian population in order to provide a home for Jewish refugees from European persecution, which has resulted in the forceful rejection by Palestinian intellectuals of the canonical story of Palestine that had served as a calculated justification of their refugee status. Fourth, the disappearance of the Palestinian patrimony (material evidence) through the deliberate confiscation of Arab cultural resources by Is- raelis (such as the large library of Dr. Tawfiq Canaan in 1948, the Palestine Archaeological Museum and its library in Jerusalem in 1967, and the library of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut in 1982), as well as the destruction of cultural property in the form of entire villages in 1948-49. This last is particularly crucial, since the Palestinians' link to their past is largely through the villages, few towns, and fewer cities that predominated in their land during the last thirteen centuries.

The fact that much of the archaeological activity in Palestine has been carried out by Western scholars in search of evidence to support and illustrate the Bible has had significant ramifications. In effect, The "archaeological record" one of the primary resources of the country has been selectively used to has been exploited to construct, support, or justify the present occupation. embellish the "history" of Palestine-in other words, the "archaeological record" has been selectively used to document and sometimes defend the version of the past required by Christian and Jewish Zionists to justify the present occupation of Palestine. One result of this Western dominance of the archaeology of Palestine-continued by the Israelis, for whom the thirteen centuries of Arab presence and cultural im- press are peripheral-has been the alienation of the native Muslim and Christian Palestinians from their own cultural past. As a consequence, it has been difficult for the Palestinians to encourage archaeologists and historians to generate an unabridged version of their own story aimed at revising the currently abridged story to include an account of the Arab contribution to the cultural history of Palestine.



72 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

The Intellectual Conquest of Palestine. The Archaeology of Palestine as a Construction of Westem Christians

Several intellectual traditions have converged to form the study of the past that we today call "archaeology." One powerful stimulus was the Renais- sance revival of and enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classical tradition in the plastic arts and architecture. It was the scholarship of Johann Winck- elmann (1717-68) that gave archaeology an art-historical tradition.' A second source was the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development of the science of geology, out of which three concepts important for archaeology emerged: stratigraphy, prehistory, and uniformitarianism.2 The association of stone tools and "human" remains in sealed deposits led to the discovery of the antiquity of hominids, and thus prehistory. This inevitably led to the view that the natural forces that created the sediments forming the landscape we know today are still at work, so that an understanding of today provides the key for interpreting the natural events of the past.

Applying this rule to cultural change is far more difficult than applying it to natural change. Nevertheless, early attempts to understand the parallel existence of preliterate and literate societies, farmers and hunter-gatherers grew out of uniformitarian assumptions.3 All of these developments occurred in Europe at a time when the people of Palestine were suffering the consequences of Ottoman weakness. The "Arab awakening" did not occur until the late nineteenth century.

With the basic intellectual components in place by the beginning of the nineteenth century, archaeology moved to the Middle East. European nations, particularly England and France, explored their own cultural origins through the search for biblical connections while vying for position in the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The process began in 1798 with Napoleon Bo- naparte's failed expedition to Egypt, which included a host of savants who published the monumental Description de l'Egypte in nineteen massive folio volumes (1809-28). The process continued in Mesopotamia with the collection of what turned out to be Assyrian art treasures from mounds in the Mosul area by Paul Emile Botta (1802-70) and Austin Henry Layard (1817- 94).4 In the course of these expeditions, Europe discovered evidence of the several high cultures in the Middle East, many predating biblical history.

By the end of the nineteenth century the ancient Near East was divided into numerous specialized fields of study dealing with the language, litera- ture, and archaeology of each area. The physical remains were often expropriated by Europeans for their edification and education; the assumption was that the living populations of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt were not sufficiently educated to appreciate their unique and ancient heritage. Indeed, Westerners laid claim to ancient Near Eastern cultural treasures as their own heritage rather than that of the peasants and town dwellers of the nineteenth- century Middle East. By then, it seemed clear that while Europe was a cul-



PALESTINLAN ARCHAEOLOGY 73

tural cross between Athens and Jerusalem, the foundations of Athens and Jerusalem had been laid by the high cultures of the ancient Near East.

There is little doubt that the archaeology of Palestine has been dominated by what has been called "biblical archaeology." British, American, German, and French archaeological involvement there had been generated by the Bi- ble. Most archaeologists were biblical scholars, except for the British, for whom the Bible was the "national epic": Since the geography of the Bible was more familiar to them than that of Europe, no special training was required. When one examines the journals devoted to the archaeology of Pal- estine, most of them beginning in the late nineteenth century, the clear emphasis is on biblical background and interpretation. This emphasis con- tinues to this day: since 1967 Jerusalem has become the center of biblical archaeology. The first Intemational Congress on Biblical Archaeology was held there in 1984, celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Israel Explo- ration Society (formerly the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society).

Once established, archaeology began to collect masses of new data that, in Palestine at least, began to be confused. Indeed, it has not been easy to define the boundaries of the rather amorphous study of "biblical archaeology" since W.F. Albright (1891-1971), who saw the biblical world as en- compassing virtually the entire Middle East and succeeded in mastering an incredible number of disciplines focusing on the ancient Near East. These he used to "illuminate" the general historical background as well as specific problems of interpretation.

In his publication of the Tall Bayt Mirsim excavation (1932-43), Albright put order into the sequence of pottery types by a rigorous application of typo- logical methods.5 But it was not until 1952, when Kathleen Kenyon (1906- 78) introduced into Palestine stratigraphic methods for excavating natural deposits, that it was possible to order with confidence the layers of tells in Palestine. Since that time there have been constant refinements in field methods and recording. But these developments have had little bearing on the motivations for excavation in Palestine, which remained for the most part tied to biblical connections.

Five foreign schools of archaeology operated in Jerusalem prior to World War I: French, American, German, British, and Italian. It was the British, however, who dominated the archaeology of Palestine. In the fifty years between 1864 and 1914, the British were responsible for ten excavations and two important surveys; the Germans were responsible for six excavations, and the Americans only one.6 Of these, the most important-important in- sofar as they developed the fundamental procedures of field work that were later refined and have endured7-was probably the work of Flinders Petrie at Tall al-Hasi in 1890 and George Reisner at Sebastia between 1908 and 1910.

During this period, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Per- mission to excavate required afirman (decree) from the sultan in Istanbul. In the judgment of one of Palestine's early excavators, "the principle under which Turkish permits were issued were based on the sound principle. . .




that national monuments must not be removed from the country ... their possession must remain with the people of the country whose they are."8 In view of the Ottomans' demonstrated lack of interest in the population of Pal- estine, this statement requires many qualifiers. Nevertheless, when com- pared to what happened to Palestine and its past under the British Mandate, some small virtue may yet be reserved for Ottoman rule.

The Mandate Period. 1919-1948

After World War I, the story of archaeology in Palestine was similar to that in other parts of the colonized Middle East, with one significant difference. In Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, the Arabs sought and gained independence from the British and French. In these countries government agencies had been established during the Mandates to preserve, excavate, publish, and exhibit the material cultural remains of national pasts. These agencies, as well as the governments themselves, were staffed by Arabs. It was, to say the least, anomalous that a similar pattern did not occur in Palestine. To be sure, there was a Department of Antiquities, established in 1920 just prior to the Man- date, which was staffed by Britons, Palestinians, and Jews. But-and this is

the significant difference-there was no serious effort by Mandate authorities to train and

There was no serious effort by encourage Palestinian archaeologists to be- Mandate authorities to come professionals. The burden of the Man- encourage Palestinian date was the commitment to encourage such archaeologists, circumstances as would facilitate the creation

of a Jewish national home. Jewish immigrants to Palestine, many of whom had received part or all of

their education in Europe where archaeology had evolved, found the discipline of archaeology intellectually congenial and, from a nationalistic point of view, essential to establishing their identity with the land. In archaeology as in other domains, development within the Jewish community was handled by the Jews themselves, and they maintained their own separate institutions. Thus, the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society had been founded in 1914 by Nahum Slouschz; the society's first excavation took place in 1921-22, at Hammath-Tiberias. By 1928, E.L. Sukenik was head of the Archaeology De- partment of Hebrew University, which had opened its doors in 1925.

For the Palestinian population, still a three-quarters majority, there was no association or institution supporting archaeology. The only possibilities for Arabs lay in the British Mandate's Department of Antiquities and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. As early as 1920, the latter institution was already "making active preparation for the training of archaeologists ... No modern religious or political question will be allowed to affect the policy of the School . . . which is conceived on the broadest lines in an organized effort to cope with the existing national need."9 The "national need" must have been British, however: no Arab students benefitted from this educa- tional opportunity.




That the British were deeply interested in the archaeology of Palestine is evident from the immediate organization, as early as 1919, of a British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and a Department of Antiquities for Palestine. These two organizations occupied the same building until 1930, though already in 1926 the directorates were separated. From 1930 until after World War II, the British School of Archaeology was housed with the American School of Oriental Research. As for the Department of Antiquities, the director as well as the Advisory Board were appointed by the high commissioner from the British, French, American, and Italian schools of archaeology in Jerusalem. In addition, two Palestinians and two Jews were appointed to represent the interests of Muslim and Jewish cultural heritage. The department was organized in five sub-units: inspectors, a records office and library, a conservation laboratory, a photographic studio, and the Palestine Museum. This last, the building of which was dedicated in 1938, had been established through a gift of $2 million (half for the building and half for the endow- ment) received by the Department of Antiquities in 1928.

It is instructive to look into the positions and contributions of Palestinians and Jews in the Mandate organizations devoted to the archaeology of Pales- tine. Of the ninety-four persons on the payroll of the Department of Antiqui- ties on 31 March 1947, six were British Christians, twenty-two were Palestinian Christians, six were Armenians, fifty-one were Palestinian Mus- lims, and nine were Jews. Although the Palestinian employees greatly out- numbered the others (not surprising given their overwhelming numerical superiority on the ground) by and large they served as guardians at sites around the country, museum guards and attendants, messengers, and clean- ers. Only a fraction of the seventy-three Palestinians employed by the department held higher positions: three of the six inspectors commonly mentioned were Palestinians (D. Baramki, S.A.S. Husseini, and N. Makhouly) and a Palestinian (the self-taught scholar Stephan H. Stephan) worked in the library.'0 But while only two of these four had university edu- cations (Baramki had a bachelor's from London at the time and Husseini one from Beirut), six of the nine Jewish employees had university degrees, including three doctorates (from Rome, Florence, and Basel), one master's (from Hebrew University), and two bachelor's (from London). The preceding points up a further difference, which is the extent to which the foundations of archaeology as a discipline in the Israeli or Jewish community were laid in Europe: Among the Palestinians who could be classified as archaeologists in the pre-1948 period, only Dimitri Baramki, as mentioned above, had studied in Europe.

Parallel to and contemporary with the founding of a Department of Antiq- uities was the formation of the Palestine Oriental Society in 1920, thanks largely to the energy of Professor A.T. Clay of Yale University, who was an- nual professor at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem that year. The membership of the society had always been dominated by foreigners, most nonresident. In 1932, for example, out of 191 members, 10 were




resident Palestinians, 22 were resident Jews, 42 were resident foreigners, and 117 were nonresidents. Palestinian membership fluctuated from a high of nineteen in 1926 to a low of five in 1934. A preliminary comparison of resident Palestinian and Jewish scholars indicates that, again, almost all the Jewish scholars had received doctorates in Europe or America before or after immigrating to Palestine. To my knowledge, the Arabs were all born in Greater Syria before World War I, and only one (Tawfiq Canaan) had a doctorate, a medical degree from the American University of Beirut.

The Department of Antiquities and the Palestine Oriental Society each sponsored a publication: the former put out the Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine (QDAP) and the latter theJoumnal of the Palestine Onen- tal Society JPOS). The difference in purposes between the two publications (and the organizations that issued them) is important. The QDAP, the scholarly voice of the Department of Antiquities, was a Mandate government publication dedicated to reporting excavations sponsored by the department as well as research dealing with the collection in the Palestine Archaeological Museum. Of necessity, then, it was dominated by the British, though both Palestinians and Jews published there as well. Of the total of 163 articles published between 1932 and 1950, 33 were contributed by six Palestinian scholars (the brothers Dimitri and Jalil Baramki, S. Husseini, N. Makhouly, N.G. Nassar, and S.H. Stephan) and 39 were contributed by six Jewish scholars, all of whom became, at one time or another, professors at Hebrew University.

By contrast, the Palestine Oriental Society-and henceJPOS-was open to anyone with a scholarly interest in what may broadly be called "Palesti- nology." The broader scope of the society's publication is reflected in the fact that Stephan's articles in the QDAP dealt mostly with Arabic and Turkish inscriptions or texts, while his articles inJPOS were mainly on folklore. In general, the Palestinians in the Palestine Oriental Society focused on living cultural traditions (Palestinian folklore, architecture, the social context of the village house, Muslim shrines, et cetera) in Palestine, while Jewish scholars there researched the topography of biblical sites and the interpretation of difficult biblical texts.1" Concerning the national breakdown of the authors, of the 335 articles published in the JPOS from 1921 to 1948), 50 were by seven Palestinian scholars (most of them by Dr. Tawfiq Canaan and Stephan Hanna Stephan) and 92 were by twenty-six resident Jewish scholars. Not reflected in QDAP, but clear inJPOS, is that Jewish immigration had a significant impact on the growing weight in numbers of Jewish scholars in archaeology, while the number of Palestinians remained relatively stable and then declined. In the first two volumes of JPOS (1921, 1922), Arabs contributed eight articles, in the last two volumes (1946, 1948), none, reflecting the in- creasing Judaization of scholarship on and from Palestine.




Palestinian Archaeology After 1948

From material published by Palestinians in bothJPOS and QDAP, it seems clear that there were learned Palestinians capable of dealing with both the archaeology and ethnography of Palestine. Of the many reasons they did not flourish after the 1948 disaster, two seem to be paramount: first, the turmoil resulting from the influx of refugees inside a sealed border now one-third of the former Palestine; and second, the lack of local academic institutions supporting scholarship in the Arab community. With Jordan's annexation of the West Bank following the 1948 debacle, the Department of Antiquities was reorganized with its headquarters in the Roman Theater in Amman. Since the dismissal of the department's British director and all the other British holdovers from the Mandate period in 1956, the emphasis on the East Bank of the Department of Antiquities (of Jordan) has been very clear.

The one center of archaeological activity that might have provided a base for Palestinian archaeologists was the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem, which was under the control not of Jordan but of trustees made up of the directors of the several foreign schools of archaeology in the city. It is therefore not clear why persons like Dimitri Baramki did not continue their work as archaeologists employed by the Palestine Museum. In any event, Jordan nationalized the museum only months before the June 1967 war, en- abling the Israelis to claim it as theirs by right of conquest.

After 1967, there were a number of Palestinians living in Jordan who had earned archaeology degrees, in Europe and the United States, but none in the occupied territories where there was no university having an archaeology department. In recent times the Israeli Department of Antiquities has been willing to hire, at best, a not-too-ambitious Palestinian B.A. Moreover, those Palestinians who did enter archaeology drank from the well of Euro-Ameri- can scholarship, assuming such to be objective reality. For the Palestinians, the missing element was the intellectual connection with Islamic tradition, in part because the most active Palestinian archaeolo- For the Palestinians, the gists came from Christian backgrounds and missing element was the in part because, even for the Muslims, there intellectual connection with had been no eighteenth- or nineteenth-cen- Islamic tradition. tury precursor to suggest that in the search for the past one could well begin with views of history generated by Arab scholars such as Ibn Khaldun.

What have been the consequences of all this for archaeology in Palestine? First, Palestinians educated in the West have adopted the Western agenda

for archaeological research, where the emphasis (when not on biblical archaeology) has been on proto- and prehistory, the Bronze and Iron Ages, and sometimes on the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Certainly, biblical archaeology has continued to prevail in the area for non-Palestinians. After 1948, the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society became the Israel Exploration Soci-




ety, which sponsored major excavations at such biblical sites as Dan, Hazor, and Beersheba. Even in the West Bank, where Jordan was in control, the momentum of biblical archaeology brought foreign excavations to Tall Balata (Shechem), Tall al-Tall ('Ai), Tall Ta'annak (Taanach), and Tall al-Sultan (Jericho). Arab participation in these predominantly American expeditions was limited to representatives of Jordan's Department of Antiquities assigned to each of the foreign excavations to monitor the excavations and gain field experience. Two of these persons became leading archaeologists-Muawiya Ibrahim, later trained in Berlin, who participated in the Tall Ta'annak excavation, and Fawzi Zayadine, later trained in Paris, who worked at Sebastia. Both are today accomplished students of traditional archaeology, now focusing their attention on Jordan, where they live and work. Though neither concentrates on the Bible, they have also not been able-or have not thought it necessary-to change the direction of archaeological research. This may in part be due to the fact that they are not working in and for Palestine as a geographical and national entity.

A second consequence is that, in the field of Islamic archaeology, Arab scholars, following their Western instructors, have focused on its art-historical aspects. This emphasis on fine arts in Islamic archaeology appeals to Arabs because it reveals the remarkably advanced technical skills of craftsmen and architects during the flowering of Islam. It is a heritage that elicits pride. But for Palestine, this is a disaster because it focuses on Jerusa- lem to the exclusion of 95 percent of the land occupied by towns and villages, many of them of considerable importance. The villages of Palestine are ignored and thus the real character of Palestine has yet to be studied.

Third, since archaeological sites can be expropriated by the government and the

The villages of Palestine are Palestinians have not been permitted a gov- ignored and thus the real ernment, land owners fear archaeologists. character of Palestine has yet The need for a benevolent Arab government to be studied. is imperative if there is to be freedom to ex-

plore the Arab past of Palestine. In Palestine a serious problem arises because of the density of evidence of the past on the landscape and because the antiquities law allows the state to expropriate land registered as a historical site. The Jordanian Provisional Antiquities Law No. 12 of 1967, Article 5, Paragraph D, reads as follows: "The Government may expropriate or buy any land or antiquity if it is in the interest of the Depart- ment to expropriate or buy it." The Israeli Antiquities Law of 1978 (Law 885), Chapter 8, deals with expropriation: "An antiquity site whose expropriation is necessary, in his [the minister's] opinion, for the purposes of pres- ervation or research," or "Any land whose expropriation is necessary, in his opinion, in order to facilitate excavation therein." These laws are based on the assumption that antiquities, movable or immovable, are the property of the state. Since for Palestinians the state is an imposed "legality," and since the state has in the past used as much "law" as is available to expropriate



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land, one cannot be surprised at the unwillingness to encourage the identification of archaeological sites. It is evident, however, that even the existence of a Palestinian state will not automatically solve the problem. What will be required will be a policy that will allow the growth and development of the built environment while at the same time preserve the subterranean cultural resources.

Steps Toward Independence: A Palestinian Archaeology In the absence of a Palestinian government, the resources required to tell

the Arab story have not been properly collected or preserved. Nor has evidence of the material culture been adequately protected or, where possible, restored. On the contrary, in the last forty-two years these resources have suffered calculated decimation. Whole villages have been destroyed, libraries and documents have been confiscated, and unique agricultural installations have been dislodged by force to be incorporated in Israeli museums.

Increasingly there is public awareness among Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories that symbols of the past must somehow be preserved, if only to keep the memory of a rich past alive for the next generation. Private museums have been organized in some towns. Collections of regional costumes have been published. Domestic architecture has been described. This is not enough, however, if an adequate public account of Arab cultural traditions are to become an integral part of the long story of Palestine. What is required is a documentation center. And equally necessary is access to the deep and rich archaeological record, the still-buried resource required to document and illustrate the Arab past in Palestine.

A Palestinian Agenda

What directions should Palestinian archaeologists take to build their own archaeological agenda?

There are formal elements in the inherited archaeology that are universally valid and can be adopted without loss by Palestinian archaeologists. There are also some substantive issues of common interest.

The similarities between the inherited and the locally derived archaeological agenda are technical and methodological. Basic to all archaeological recovery is attention to the bedding lines of sediments. The stratigraphic excavation methods developed in the work of foreigners in the Middle East can, with suitable adaptation, be said to be universally applicable. A by- product of sedimentary analysis is now site formation, a study particularly important in interpreting the deposits that form a tell. The technical analysis of artifact-formation processes is also very useful, especially useful in dealing with pottery, glass, or metal artifacts, but this is not commonly carried out: a restraining factor for foreigners is the cost of these generally labor-intensive analyses. Indigenous archaeologists, on the other hand, are probably more interested in such methods because the information thus obtained often has



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direct relevance for interpreting local cultural traditions and, by implication, for present self-understanding and local development. Thus, with a clear present value for such information, the cost factor may not appear as important. Another common area would be descriptions of conditions in Palestine, particularly after the eleventh century B.C., found in literary sources. The correlation of material evidence and literary texts requires critical examina- tion of both data types, a system of analysis that also is universally applicable.

Most of the differences between the archaeological agenda inherited from the Western Christian and Jewish scholars and an archaeological agenda generated with a view to the needs, values, and interests of the native Pales- tinian population relate not to technical questions but to substance. These substantive differences, which reflect sensitivities derived from both education and the explicit issues of cultural identity raised by the Palestinian community, are critical to the nature of Palestinian archaeology. Adaptations of this list of research interests can be found in many other nations of the world.

The first difference involves the focus on a distant past as opposed to reaching the distant past through delving into recent times, or indeed the present. If we begin with the definition of archaeology as the study of the material expression of human thought and action, we are not confined to the past, as an etymological definition of the term would suggest. Beginning with the present can be supported by both national and methodological argu- ments. Where continuity of the present with the past is a reasonable assumption, elements of the deeper past are still alive in traditional village

settlement patterns, architecture of domestic and public buildings, subsistence systems,

Elements of the deeper past and social organization. In order to under- are still alive . . . to stand the changes that have occurred it is understand the changes that necessary and possible to move backward have occurred it iS necessary through time. For the living population who and possible to move are heirs to that tradition, it is logical to begin backward through time. the process of exploring the past with the im-

mediately preceding period, which in Pales- tine is the period of Ottoman rule. That this has not been done is not surprising since the native population of Palestine has not been in control of their own archaeological record. This, then, is the most significant difference between the foreign focus on "biblical archaeology" and the Arab version, Palestinian archaeology.

There are several implications of this difference. In countries where archaeology is a serious government program, the first task is to make an intensive survey of existing physical remains of the past. It has become a required feature of archaeological surface surveys to collect not only evidence of the remains of past human activities but also to gather from local oral tradition place-names and the known function of buildings and installations, at least in secondary use.12 The Israeli government has an ambitious survey program. Maps are being produced at a scale of 1:20,000. The area inside the




Green Line will be covered in 267 volumes.13 The first volume published covered 56 square kilometers along the coast south of Haifa in the area of 'Atlit.14 Two villages destroyed in 1948 were included, 'Ayn Haud and al-Mazar.15 The pottery on both sites is read as Byzantine and In Palestine, the oral tradition Arab. Of the 145 sites covered, 55 are said to has gone with the expelled have "no antiquities." These sites include native population. many lime kilns, caves, ruins of buildings, wells, and other evidence of human activity. Amazingly, 110 of the 145 sites have no names. I say "amazingly" because Arabs have a name for every plot of land, hill, spring, and any unusual feature on the landscape. These to- ponymics are often part of the local oral tradition not found on published maps. In Palestine, the oral tradition has gone with the expelled native population. One of the gaps in the understanding of Palestine that will forever remain a lacuna in the knowledge of the land arises from the expulsion of the population of hundreds of villages in 1948.

A second significant difference in agenda arises from the difference between the inherited perspective and that of the native of Palestine. It has been a common assumption that Palestinian culture is borrowed, largely from the great centers of urban culture in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This is based on the assumption that the population of Palestine was non-urban and unsophisticated. R.A.S. Macalister, an important early excavator, concludes a description of work at Tall Zakariya saying: "The experience at Tell el-Hesy was repeated; the excavator was working in the remains of a people of low culture, entirely dependent on Egypt and the Aegean, to a lesser degree on the empires of Mesopotamia, for its arts and civilization.",16 And again reflecting on Sellin's excavation at Tall Ta'annak, "There was the same com- plete absence of any evidence of a native-born civilization." 17 Thus, for example, it has been assumed that the terre pise mounds that surrounded the city defenses in the second quarter of the second millennium B.C. were brought to the land by the Hyksos,18 and that the casemate defense systems and ashlar construction were innovations introduced in the tenth century B.C.

from Anatolia via Phoenicia.19 We now know that none of these construction techniques was imported from abroad, that in fact all these systems were native to Palestine. Against the hyper-diffusionist perspective the Palestinian archaeologist will search for the evidence for the adaptive systems engineered by the native inhabitants in the different ecological zones of the land. Ar- chaeology is then a tool that can be used to identify the specific forms of cultural expression linking the present with the past. Village Study

The two different agendas mentioned above-using the present or recent past as a starting point, and throwing off inherited preconceptions about early Palestinian cultures-can be well met by focusing on the Palestinian village. There are, however, a number of important obstacles to village study.




First, more than half of all the Arab villages in Palestine were destroyed by the Israelis between 1948 and 1950. Second, many of the house-by-house plans of all of the villages drawn up during the British Mandate are not now accessible. Third, the population of the West Bank today is suspicious of the motives of anyone collecting information about their villages. They find it difficult to believe that such study can be of value to them. More likely, in their view, the researcher will provide the occupation authorities with information that could be used to their disadvantage. Fourth, village study requires a team composed of an anthropologist, an architect, an archaeologist, a photographer, and a historian. Such a team would require a permit from the occupation which would be difficult to obtain. Fifth, such a project would be long-term and expensive, though its benefits would extend far into the future. Finally, however desirable the excavation of a destroyed village would be, receiving a permit would predictably be virtually impossible because of Israeli fears that such an endeavor would generate adverse nationalistic publicity among the Palestinians.

Another human settlement type on the recent landscape of Palestine de- serves the archaeologist's attention, namely, refugee camps, some of which in the Jericho region are virtually abandoned. Traces of refugees' presence can easily be bulldozed from the surface of the land, but refugee archaeology is a research subject that would make a significant contribution to understanding the real world of Palestine today.

Profile of an Archaeologist

A critical step toward intellectual independence of the Palestinian archaeologist is education. The ultimate aim of such a process is not only an effec- tive handling of the tools of the profession but also sensitivity to community needs and the willingness to lead. I will limit myself here to the strictly archaeological aspect of education, assuming that what has been said above provides some indication of the kinds of projects that will help create a more accurate picture of the cultural history of Palestine. Now I want to outline some of the experiences and skills required to work on these projects successfully.

The profile of an archaeologist requires one to be physically and mentally robust, able to endure the long hours of outdoor activity including observa- tion and recording of minute details which ultimately are sewn together into a seamless whole-the story. Included in this profile is a space-time sensitivity, that is, on the one hand, intuitive three-dimensional imaging that helps recreate the whole from the part remaining and on the other hand, ability to see these fragmented forms changing through time. These qualities are best tested during several seasons of field excavation and survey. It is within the context of an excavation that the qualities needed in an archaeologist become clear: the ability to work under pressure and still function as a member of a team, to organize one's own work and that of the team, to think clearly and record details accurately. The archaeologist needs to teach by example be-




cause some of the students on the team will inevitably see a future in archaeology.

Once the field work is completed, another level of work begins. The data collected must be analyzed, interpreted, and then synthesized-that is, the story must be told. Since no one person can analyze all of the data, a team of specialists is required that in the best of all worlds would also be familiar with the need for and meaning of stratigraphic separation. The essential special skills are sediment analysis, ceramics, lithics, botanical identification, faunal identification, and historical sources where applicable: a formidable archaeological team would include a specialist in each of these six areas as- sisted by appropriate technicians, all working together with mutual respect for each other's efforts. Finally, the future archaeologist should have the opportunity to follow the process from field recovery through analysis to writing and publication.

Defining a Palestinian Archaeology

Up until recently, the archaeology of Pales- tine can be said to have focused largely, if not exclusively, on biblical archaeology, a seg- Palestinian archaeologye ment of the past reconstructed to support acknowledges the polyethnic Jewish claims to Palestine. One could claim nature of Palestinian cultural that a "Palestinian archaeology" is but the history. other side of the coin, an archaeology with an equally political intent. This claim would have merit if a Palestinian archaeology involved an effort to efface the record relating to the Jews, Jerusalem in the tenth and second centuries B.C., or synagogues in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., for example. But this is not the case. Palestinian archaeology, assuming the general veracity of written records, acknowledges the polyethnic nature of Palestinian cultural history. Indeed, research into the dis- tinctive features of ethnic diversity is an important feature on the research agenda of Palestinian archaeology. As in all good science, we do not favor one answer or the other. We will test for multicultural indicators as a hy- pothesis-no more than that-to determine the probability of its truth.

What is the rationale for a Palestinian archaeology different from that which has been promoted by Western archaeologists? First, if archaeology is the study of the materialization of human thought and action, then it is not bound by chronology. In other words, archaeology is not merely the study of what is old, though it certainly includes antiquity; instead, archaeology should attempt to correlate the adaptation of materials and space to human needs. Second, since the past is dead, it can be interpreted only by analogy with human experience. The valid experience is obviously that which is closest in both time and space to what one wants to interpret: in the case of Palestine, this brings us into the traditional villages. I am not forgetting the towns, but for the sake of abbreviating the argument we will stay with the village on the assumption that what we are currently excavating is a village.




Just as I excavate backward through space and time, so I interpret backward from the known to the unknown. To be sure, there are many problems along the way. Nothing can be taken for granted. There are significant regional and class differences in Palestine and within each district and segment of society. There are ongoing changes. For example, a hawsh in the Birzeit district is a house including the courtyard. To the west, near Ramla, the hawsh is the courtyard only, but a courtyard that is still very much a part of the bayt (house). In Taqu'a, on the desert's edge, the hawsh is the courtyard separated from the house in which animals are penned. In any case, these examples are from the twentieth century, close to our own experience. To study the forces compelling change that are close in time and where the documentation is controllable makes it possible to generate explanatory hypoth- eses about the deeper past than can be tested by the archaeological record. This means that Palestinian archaeology is not only more relevant to living Palestinians, but also qualitatively better archaeology.

NOTES

1. W. Leppmann, Winckelmann (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). 2. G. Daniel, 150 Years of Archaeology, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth: 1975). 3. B. Orme, Anthropology for Archaeologists (London: Duckworth, 1981). 4. B. Fagan, Return to Babylon: Travelers, Archaeologists and Monuments in Mesopotamia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 85-137. 5. Gus Van Beek, "W.F. Albright's Contribution to Ar- chaeology," in Gus Van Beek, ed., The Scholarship of William Foxwell Albnght: An Appraisal (Atlanta: Schol- ars Press, 1989), pp. 61-73. 6. R.A.S. Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1925). 7. G.E. Wright, "Archaeological Method in Palestine- An American Interpretation," Eretz-Israel 9 (1969): pp. 120-33. 8. Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, p. 54; Article 21 of the Mandate stipulated that an Antiquities Law was to be prepared within a year (R. Allen, Imperi- alism and Nationalism in the Fertile Crescent: Sources and Prospects of the Arab-Israeli Conflict [New York: Oxford University Press, 19741, pp. 628-29), but the first law was apparently not published until 1929 (H.C. Luke and E. Keith-Roach, eds., The Handbook of Palestine and Trans-Jordan [London: Macmillan, 19301, p. 86). The Mandate's Antiquities Law, published in 1929 (Luke and Keith-Roach, The Handbook of Palestine and Trans- Jordan, p. 86), stated that any artifact or architecture dated to A.D. 1700 or earlier was a protected "antiquity." Human and animal remains earlier than A.D. 600 were protected by the law. In contrast to the Ottoman law, which had required all recovered artifacts to be de- posited in the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, the Mandate law allowed the expedition director half the

portable finds to be distributed among sponsoring institutions in order to encourage foreign investment in the archaeology of Palestine. 9. Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1920: p. 54. 10. Baramki was with the department from 1927 to 1948, Husseini from 1930 to 1948, and Makhouly from 1922 to 1948. Stephan was at the Library from 1920 to 1948. Dimitri Baramki (1909-84) was the most prolific of the Arab archaeologists. His major contribution was the thirteen-year excavation of Qasr Hisham (1935-47). After the collapse of the Mandate in 1948, he worked on excavations sponsored by the American School in Jerusalem before moving to a teaching post at the American University of Beirut in 1951, and received a doctorate from London in 1953. His dissertation was based essentially on the results of his excavation of Khirbat al-Mafjar, erroneously labelled Qasr Hisham. 11. There were exceptions, especially in the 1920s, when Moshe Stekelis wrote on prehistory and Leo Ary Mayer wrote on Muslim texts and artifacts. 12. D. Miller, "Archaeology and Development," Cur- rent Anthropology 21 (1980): p. 712. 13. S. Yeivin, "Israel's Archaeological Survey," Ariel 18 (1967): pp. 80-85. 14. A. Ronen and Y. Olami, 'Atlit Map, Volume 1 (Je- rusalem: Archaeological Survey of Israel, 1978). 15. Ronen and Olami, 'Atlit Map, pp. 56, 63-65. 16. Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, p. 56. 17. Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, p. 64. 18. Kathleen Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 166. 19. Y. Aharoni, The Archaeology of the Land of Israel (London: SCM Press, 1978), pp. 198-99.



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