An Afterword on History, Archaeology and Heritage in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

Archaeological research in the southern Levant region (Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Transjordan) could as an anecdote be said to have started with Lady Hester Stanhope’s amateurish digging at Ashkelon in 1815. Most of the subsequent Western archaeological work carried out in the region during the nineteenth century was driven, more or less, by religious or nationalist sentiments, and it was equally embedded in the colonial and imperial background of a geopolitical struggle among European (and later in the twentieth century, American) powers for influence and intervention in the Middle East. It would be only with W.M. Flinders Petrie’s excavation at Tell el-Hesi in 1890 that proper scientific archaeological research would be triggered in the region. Notwithstanding this, the imperial context would expand for several more decades in the region, affecting the ways the past of the region was imagined and re-constructed (cf. Díaz-Andreu 2007: 99–166; Melman 2020; Meskell 2020).