The Changing Landscape Of Israeli Archaeology

Focused on the connections between archaeology and Israeli society, this book examines the development of Israeli archaeological research, taking historical, sociological, and political contexts into account. Adopting a Foucauldian framework of power and knowledge, the author begins by focusing on archaeological knowledge as a hegemonic discipline, buttressing the national Zionist identity after the establishment of the State of Israel. The liberalization of political culture in the late 1970s, it is argued, opened the door for a more democratized archaeological discipline. Making use of in-depth interviews with archaeologists belonging to various groups in Israeli society as well as documents from the Israel State Archives (ISA), the book touches on multiple fields of research, including Near Eastern archaeology, religious Jewish society, Israel/Palestine relations, and the status of women in Israel. Moreover, although the book deals with the sociology of Israeli archaeology specifically, the author’s comparative approach—which highlights the mirroring of social processes and the archaeological discipline—can also be applied to other societies. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of archaeology, sociology, and Israel Studies, as well as to readers with a general interest in the archaeology of the Holy Land.

The land of Israel is rich in history and material culture and has long been the location of extensive archaeological excavation. 'Just Past?' examines the origins of Israeli archaeology in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on previously unpublished documentary material, the study offers a history of intriguing finds, failures and dreams. 'Just Past?' covers a range of topics, from the 1948 war to the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, issues of foreign aid, and the political circumstances behind the decision to start excavations at Masada. Highlighting the centrality of politics to archaeology in Israel/Palestine, 'Just Past?' presents an assessment of the origins of Israeli archaeology which will be invaluable to students and scholars of history and archaeology.

By publishing these ten essays in English in the BAR series the research carried out by the contributors, and the evidence and fieldwork methodologies they cite, is made available to a much wider audience. This volume contains an important collection of case studies and overviews of rural settlement in Israel from late prehistory to the modern period. Addressing broad questions on the physical nature of settlements, their appearance and disappearance from the archaeological record, the relationship between rural and urban sites, settlement patterns and processes, and economic activities, the contributors offer a good cross-section of approaches to the subject.

In the light of most recent archaeological research and accumulation of new data, it now appears that after three to four hundred years of urban life (EBIb-EBII), a severe settlement and demographic crisis occured in some regions of the country, after which a clear distinction between a "northern" and a "southern" pattern of settled areas could be distinguished ("EBIII"). This pattern lasted until the end of the Early Bronze Age.

Archaeology in Israel is truly a national obsession, a practice through which national identity—and national rights—have long been asserted. But how and why did archaeology emerge as such a pervasive force there? How can the practices of archaeology help answer those questions? In this stirring book, Nadia Abu El-Haj addresses these questions and specifies for the first time the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement, and the production of historical knowledge. She analyzes particular instances of history, artifacts, and landscapes in the making to show how archaeology helped not only to legitimize cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully, to reshape them. Moreover, she places Israeli archaeology in the context of the broader discipline to determine what unites the field across its disparate local traditions and locations. Boldly uncovering an Israel in which science and politics are mutually constituted, this book shows the ongoing role that archaeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.

This edited volume offers a new critical approach to the study of Zionist history and Israeli-Palestinian relations, based on the encounter between history and anthropology. Informed by the anthropological method of setting large questions to intimate settings, the book examines processes of Zionist colonization, nation-building and Palestinian dispossession by focusing on encounters between members of different national, religious and ethnic groups “from below”—through paying close attention to life stories and reconstructing everyday practices and micro-histories of places and communities. Thus, it tells a complex story in which the practices of historical actors are not simply reducible to a single underlying logic of colonization, even as they participate in the production and reproduction of colonial structures. This approach effectively undermines the prevailing tendency to study national communities in isolation, projecting onto the past an essentialist and rigid separation. Rather than assuming two clearly bounded and monolithic national groups, caught from the start in perpetual conflict, this volume probes their historical production through their evolving relationships, and their varied and shifting political, social, economic and cultural manifestations. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in an array of fields, including the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, anthropological perspectives on settler colonialism, and Zionism.