Toward a Decolonized Future in Archaeology

The authors are first to be commended for writing this critical book in the form of a conversation on issues of colonialism in Greece and Israel/Palestine. It is a book that everyone with an opinion on the Middle East should read. The book is not without flaws, yet it still raises important questions.The archaeology of the Middle East is fraught, without a doubt. Raphael Greenberg is a rare archaeologist who has taken the time to excavate and properly document the Palestinian ruins of the modern era. At Tell es-Safi/Gath, where I have worked, the director, Prof. Aren Maeir, has chosen to work around the Palestinian village, leaving it intact with the hopes that it would at some point be excavated by Palestinian archaeologists. In contrast, the first overseas site I worked at in Syria was beneath an Islamic cemetery, and the authoritarian Assad regime moved the cemetery to make it easier for us to excavate there, not bothering to worry about what people of the village thought. As Greenberg has observed to the press, “There is a spectrum of reactions, from the positive, ‘finally someone is interested in our past’ to the negative ‘why are Israelis nosing around in our destroyed villages’” (David 2023). However, he concludes, “at least it’s an ongoing conversation.” Greenberg has been accused of using archaeology to erase Palestinian identity and promote Jewish identity. However, Israel is not a monolithic entity, and I can speak unequivocally for many archaeologists when I say that this erasure does not occur where I worked in Israel.In keeping with the theme of the book, I would like to provide my own nonacademic biography: I’m a half-Lebanese nonpracticing Maronite Christian, a grandchild of Lebanese immigrants I mainly knew through my mother’s stories. I grew up exposed to Lebanese culture, and I have worked in the Middle East for forty years, initially in Syria, followed by one season in Egypt, and later in Israel. In addition, I have traveled widely in the region, including in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. In spite or perhaps because of my own experiences, I can say that the Middle East is a geographically, environmentally, culturally, politically, and religiously complex region that most people in the West have little knowledge of or ability to reckon with. I have also lived and worked extensively in Greece and Cyprus, giving me a broader perspective than that provided in the book.Right away, Greenberg’s biography establishes an insider/outsider dichotomy in that he has attained a particular and privileged institutional and experiential status based on being Jewish and Israeli as opposed to Palestinian. In fact, Israel is home to a plurality of identities, including Christian, Muslim, and Druze Palestinians; the staggering number of religious subcategories among Israeli Jews; and the members of the ethnically entangled and apolitical Baha’i faith. Greenberg’s own experience is heavily informed by his participation in rescue archaeology in the Israel Antiquities Authority. This begs for a comparison with state archaeology in Greece. There, the Ephorate (Greek department of antiquities) jobs typically go to women, while the more prestigious academic posts go to men. The male-dominated nature of Greek institutions of higher education may contribute to the prevalence of colonial academic approaches to the archaeology of Greece, and it’s unfortunate that this gendered difference in approaches is not addressed in the book or highlighted with regard to Israel (e.g., Heath-Stout, Erny, and Nakassis 2023).Greenberg discusses the absence of introspection in Israeli state archaeology, and although the same absence can often be seen in classical archaeology, I would suggest that there have been some changes in this landscape. I think Greenberg paints with too broad a brush. This introspection can be seen in the work of Israel Finkelstein, Aren Maeir, and Erez ben Yosef, to name a few.1The George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests made an important impact on Greenberg and played a key role in opening his eyes to structural racism (3). In our present moment, by contrast, a populist resurgence in Europe and in the US, influenced by politicians eager to embrace authoritarian leaders, has been accompanied by a rise in racist ideologies against Arabs, Jews, and others in a manner not seen since World War II. This new authoritarianism’s disregard and even dismissal of expertise stands in contrast to Yannis Hamilakis’s anecdote about his parents’ interest in the Greek past and the value placed on education.2 Hamilakis (4) also discusses the fetishization of classical archaeology and marginalization of the Prehistoric and Byzantine periods he experienced as a student.I suppose I should not be amazed at how much Hamilakis’s youthful experience mirrors my own, in terms of both my parents’ outlook and the centrality of the Classical period in academic culture at the expense of other periods, which were sometimes jokingly referred to as pre- and post-interesting. Where we deviate is that I naively followed a reverse trajectory, hoping to escape the disillusionment fostered during my studies for a BA in political science at the University of Southern California and over a decade of campaign work by moving into archaeology and fleeing to the past. Perhaps my disillusionment is why I immediately detected Evans’s and Graham’s fantasy narrative of kings, queens, palaces, and so forth, and it was my anger at these narratives that led me to study the Minoans (Hitchcock 2000). In contrast to my experiences, and perhaps initially to Hamilakis’s as a student, Greenberg was taught that science should be kept free of politics, even though the thorough immersion of archaeology in politics was covered in depth by Shanks and Tilley as early as the 1980s (1987, 1989).3As alluded to above, the book is underresearched in a few areas. For example, Greenberg and Hamilakis’s discussion of Winckelmann’s famous construction of social hierarchies of birth, maturity, and decline (4) ignores the earlier development of this model by Vasari (Fernie 1996: 22–42) and later perpetuation by Darwin, followed by Evans (1921: esp. 25), and also situated into its orientalist framework (Hitchcock 2000: 43; 2008: 188–95).4 The authors’ binary view of Israel and Palestine, without the direct participation of Palestinian voices of different faiths, is particularly frustrating (contrast Friedman 1989).5I was particularly anxious to read this book for the chapter on purification, an issue I have been considering in relation to the socioeconomic history of plague, its long historical association with outsiders, its connections with conspiracies and stereotypes, and finally its relevance for the present.6Hamilakis (2013, ch. 4) has discussed the equation of the neighborhoods and monuments of the “Other” in Greece with dirt, contamination, and disease in contrast to the classical monuments of the fifth century BCE as well as local beautification efforts in contemporary society. The “shameful” post-Classical period additions are compared to the droppings of birds of prey (a metaphor for foreign invaders). Hamilakis further comments on themes of filth and animality linked to the olfactory nature of dung, whereby migrants are associated with pollution requiring purification, which is achieved through a return to the sacralization of classical antiquity. Hamilakis’s observations correlate well with Trump’s descriptions of urban neighborhoods in the US as infested with vermin, a metaphor he has now extended to include migrants, his political enemies in the press, and critics within his own party. In addition, Trump signed a (now revoked) executive order to promote neoclassical architecture as the official style for new federal buildings in Washington, DC. Hamilakis’s discussion would have profited from acknowledging the fact that the association of migrants with pollution is a very old and embedded historical concept. In his role as an averter of pestilence, Apollo was associated with keeping impure and foreign elements away. The Hittites became suspicious of Egyptian prisoners when plague came to Hattusa, the Old Testament associated mouse plague with the Philistines, Athenians linked pestilence with Spartan prisoners during the Peloponnesian wars, and thousands of Jews were murdered in fourteenth-century CE Europe after having been accused of enabling the transmission of the black plague. Similar arguments can be made regarding the long history of biological categories of ethnic identity, but space does not permit.This is a book that everyone who is lacking a basic familiarity with the issues under discussion needs to read as a primer. However, it is unfortunate that it needed to be written at all. The more things change in the rarefied practice of archaeology at elite universities, the more they also seem frozen in time. While R. Futo Kennedy has recently worked passionately to create an astounding set of resources on race, ethnicity, and the classics,7 the author of the Eurocentric Not Out of Africa (1996), M. R. Lefkowitz, will soon be feted in New York by the Board of Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at its annual gala and awarded with the Athens Prize for outstanding contributions to the study of ancient Greece.8 In a sense, the book is a significant intellectual pebble in the larger contemporary global political sea, which is repeating disturbing historical patterns. While the end of the Cold War, an enlarged NATO, and the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a brief period of giddy optimism with the transient appearance of new freedoms in the Russian federation, the invasion of Ukraine by the genocidal, racist, Christo-Fascist Putin has shown us how far we have to go. And just to make sure the message doesn’t escape us, we have recently witnessed the combined arms invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 79—plans about which Israeli military and intelligence officials knew far in advance, then dismissed (Bergman and Goldman 2023); Netanyahu had also been warned of the dangers of his policies by the Saudis (Hirsh 2023).10 I could go on, but I will just say that the world is geopolitically a far more dangerous place than at any other time since the end of World War II. Books like Archaeology, Nation, and Race have a role to play in bringing stability to the twenty-first century and inspiring the voiceless to insist on a greater role in debates about where archaeology should go in a decolonized future

Archaeology · Environmental ethics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Philosophy

• Double Colonization

  Yannis Hamilakis, Yannis Hamilakis Yannis Hamilakis•Hesperia The Journal of the…•2013

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• Archaeology into the 1990s

  Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley•Norwegian Archaeological Review•1989

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• Demographic Dynamics of Publishing in the American Journal of Archaeology

  Laura E Heath-Stout, Grace Erny et al.•American Journal of Archaeology•2023

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