Should We Repatriate an On-Campus Archaeological Collection from the Middle East

As the Director of the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology at Pacific School of Religion, I have purview over a legacy collection from an excavation in the Middle East, which has resided in Berkeley, California, since the 1920s–1930s. The vast majority of our collection, well over 98 percent, comes from a single excavation project led by W. F. Badè to Tell en-Nasbeh in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Badè received permits to excavate at Tell en-Nasbeh from the Department of Antiquities of the Mandate prior to each dig season, rented areas of the site from the land owners before digging, and included compensation for crops not planted (McCown 1947: 3). At the end of each of the five excavation seasons, a representative from the Department of Antiquities selected out objects for partage, following the law of the Mandate government (McCown 1947: 5–10) (Fig. 1). The remaining items were then crated and legally shipped out of the region to the port of Oakland and transported to Pacific School of Religion nearby in Berkeley (Fig. 2). At the time of the arrival of the objects in Berkeley, the wing of the Holbrook Building at Pacific School of Religion that housed the Palestine Institute and its museum space was not yet constructed. This building project followed in the early 1940s. In addition to several thousand objects, the Badè Museum also contains all of the original documentation from the project; including architectural drawings, notes, object records (Fig. 3), and photographs. This documentation has allowed contextual research on the collection and the excavation to continue into the twenty-first century.1From a legal standpoint, there is no call to repatriate the Tell en-Nasbeh collection. As I have detailed above, the objects were legally excavated and exported. Repatriation often involves ethical or moral sets of issues, which raises an interesting question for our collection. To which national entity would these materials be repatriated? The site's geographic location on the southern outskirts of Ramallah is in the territory of the Palestinian Authority. The site's ancient cultural associations, however, are with the Kingdom of Judah in its Iron II phase and the imperial province of Judah in its Babylonian-early Persian phase. Some would see this ancient cultural attribution as a link for the collection to the modern state of Israel. Others would argue for a more global approach; suggesting that the collection should remain in Berkeley, where it serves to help educate an audience of museum visitors who might not have the financial means, time, or the physical ability to travel to the Middle East to see comparable collections. As long as the collection is exhibited and stored responsibly, made available to the public and to scholars, and protected for future generations, I feel that it is best off here in California.With several thousand objects in our collection from the five primary strata at Tell en-Nasbeh, which date to the EB I, Iron I, Iron II, Babylonian-early Persian period, and Roman-Byzantine period, the Badè Museum is the largest collection of its type west of Chicago. Thus it fills a gap for a museum audience that desires exposure to the cultures of ancient Israel or Judah, arguably represented by the materials from the Iron II-early Persian periods at the site, with a collection that is unparalleled in the western United States. The objects in context tell a unique story of everyday life in a large Judean village, and also serve as an entrée for introducing the public at large to the fields of archaeology and material culture studies (Fig. 4). Besides our regular open hours, the Museum also provides programming and exhibit openings to add to our public outreach and the educational value of the collection. The Badè has continued a long-standing program of traveling exhibits, which are borrowed by educational and religious institutions throughout the United States. We provide virtual outreach online through our website and Facebook pages. I am also a professor at Pacific School of Religion and its sister consortium, the Graduate Theological Union, and use the objects and Museum exhibits in my teaching and research, and encourage other professors and graduate students to do likewise. The Museum provides services for interested groups, which range from classes at Pacific School of Religion, the Graduate Theological Union, neighboring UC Berkeley, and Mills College, but also include tours for seniors, church and synagogue groups, home schooled children, special needs adults, and even a group from Kaiser Permanente as part of team-building experience.Behind the scenes, we have worked diligently on preventive conservation measures in storage to insure the future of the collection. We have rehoused the objects in archival boxes and lined storage shelves with archival ethafoam (Fig. 5). We have instituted a contextual database project, which captures not only vital information on each object but relates the objects to original documentation, such as object notes (millimeter cards), photographs, and past publications (Fig. 6). The database also allows us to better locate and track objects in storage. To help bring transparency and access to the collection, we have made this database available on the Internet through Open Context (http://opencontext.org/projects/B4345F6A-F926-4062-144E-3FBC175CC7B6). Currently there are 932 objects from Tell en-Nasbeh that are accessible through Open Context, out of a collection numbered over 6,000. Thus, contextual research on those 932 artifacts may be conducted remotely, from any location that has Internet access. Eventually the entire excavation collection will be remotely accessible, and it will be possible to add in the objects that remained in country, currently housed by the Israel Antiquities Authority, and ones that were sent to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City back in the 1920s–1930s. Work on the collection and exhibitions has primarily been conducted by graduate students from the neighboring department of Near Eastern Studies and program in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at UC Berkeley, who have gained invaluable professional development and work experience and have gone on in wide-ranging careers in museums and the archaeology of the Middle East.Besides focusing my own research on the collection since my arrival at the Badè Museum in 2002 (https://psr.academia.edu/AaronBrody), we have also encouraged other scholars and students to work on aspects of the Tell en-Nasbeh excavation project for publication. Most recently this has culminated in a co-edited volume of studies on Tell en-Nasbeh (Zorn and Brody 2014), the first book-length publication since the final reports for the project came out in 1947. W. F. Badè died six months after the final dig season ended in 1935, and his New Testament colleague at Pacific School of Religion, C. C. McCown, undertook the responsibilities of oversight for the processing of, and research on, the collection which culminated in the two final report volumes (McCown 1947; Wampler 1947). José Balcells has written the first dissertation since Jeffery R. Zorn's, based on a case-study on the collection, and is revising his work into a monograph (Balcells 2015; Zorn 1993); and Amy Vulcan completed her undergraduate thesis based on the collection (2015). With the continued involvement of Jeffrey R. Zorn, whose 1993 dissertation on the stratigraphy of the site remains the standard on which all of our contextual research is based, we have digitized the Nasbeh final report volumes and made them fully searchable and accessible on the web (http://bade.psr.edu/content/other-media). We have also digitized Badè's 1932 field manual, and are working on his preliminary reports. Through research and publication, we have provided a type of intellectual outreach that continues to make the Tell en-Nasbeh collection relevant into the twenty-first century.Through permanent and changing exhibits, programming, and research and publication the Badè Museum has provided access and insights into an archaeological collection unique in the western United States. Every year we host over 900 visitors during our public open hours, and more come for our openings and lectures putting our visitorship well over 1,000 to a campus that has under 250 students. Our virtual outreach, at least through Open Context, has documented over 25,000 visits to Badè Museum object records. Our research program has recently yielded several scholarly presentations and articles, a co-edited volume, a dissertation, and an undergraduate thesis. None of this would have been possible had W. F. Badè not had the foresight to set up an institute for studying and publishing the finds from his Tell en-Nasbeh project at Pacific School of Religion, which today is represented by the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology

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