Israel Studies

Israel Studies 7.2 (2002) 33-61

Producing (Arti) Facts:
Archaeology and Power During the British Mandate of Palestine

Nadia Abu El-Haj

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"THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE have always known that they weren't the first ones here. [They] wanted to know who came before them. Can I find my cultural roots in this land? They wanted to know about their heritage . . . about each and every stone . . . An artifact, an inscription had the power to bridge thousands of years . . ." In these words, one of the archaeologists I interviewed described how and why archaeology a national-cultural practice of supreme importance to the pre-state Jewish Yishuv and subsequently, in the newly established state of Israel. Another archaeologist explained that secular Zionists needed to "touch the antiquities of the land in order to connect with it." Both these archaeologists posited a natural connection between ancient objects and national persons. Archaeology is understood to be heritage, artifacts to embody "cultural roots," something about which every Jew in Palestine and later, in Israel, clearly wanted to know.

Until recently, scholars have analyzed the significance of archaeology to Israeli society primarily in relation to the question of nationhood. In a land in which the vast majority of Jewish inhabitants were "immigrants," members of distinct Jewish communities who came together in what was first Palestine and later, the state of Israel, archaeology as a national-cultural practice has been argued to have been integral to the struggle to produce a cohesive national identity. The need or the search for roots in an "old-new" land, a secular Jewish nationalist community, the problems facing an immigrant society, and the ideological needs of the state provide the historical circumstances widely identified with having generated the salience of archaeology in Israeli society. ¹

By examining the projects and practices involved in producing archaeology as a discipline and as a cardinal national-cultural pursuit, and [End Page 33] analyzing the multiple motivations for, and various effects of that work, I develop an alternative account. Focusing on the pre-state period of British mandatory rule and Jewish settlement in Palestine, I consider the dynamics of discipline building and archaeological practice, and the field's epistemological commitments. I develop an understanding of scientific work that relies neither on a straightforward reduction of scientific practice to already constituted social interests (that is, that the work of Israeli archaeology was simply a reflection of state ideology), nor on a rather untenable epistemological position that "bias" had no impact on "results." ² Instead, I track a far more complex and dynamic relationship between scientific and social practices that emerged during the Mandate, through which archaeology was institutionalized and its social significance produced, and through which it substantiated, historical claims, saturating Palestine with a particular history and a very distinctive historicity. ³ In so doing, I situate the significance of Jewish archaeological practice in relation not simply to the problem of Jewish peoplehood—i.e. that archaeology emerged as a key national-cultural practice through which roots could be sought, national unity forged, and national cultural values disputed. In order to understand its dynamics and significance, archaeological work cannot be analyzed solely within this nation-building framework. ⁴ That would be to accept uncritically one of the most significant effects of archaeological practice, an outcome of the complex dynamics of a colonial encounter in which archaeology came to play a powerful role. Jewish settlement in Palestine was framed, and legitimized in relation to a belief in Jewish national return, an ideology of national right that became ever more powerful and salient for its members and supporters following the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust. Palestine and Israel, that is, the colony and the metropole, were and are the same place, the former quite rapidly and repeatedly transformed into a cultural and historical space to which the Jewish settlers would lay national claim and over which they would assert sovereign ownership. ⁵ The practice of archaeology was essential to substantiating nationalist sensibilities and claims in this settler-colony...