EXCAVATING EARTH AND MEMORY

The Role of Archaeology in Our Liberation1

Hamdan Taha

I WAS BORN at dawn on the fifth of November 1954, to Mohammed and Fatima, in our family summer cabin in Wadi Abu Safar, east of our home town of Shiyukh. The Shrine of Sheikh Ahmed, which was next to an oak tree by the same name, was regarded as God’s eyes that oversee the place. As children, we were tasked with carrying the vows and prayers of the visitors, little matchboxes and candles that they left behind to the Hedmi mosque in the village. I recall memories from my early childhood in the family yard, the scent of the seasons in the earth, the games I played with my friends, running through the narrow alleys of our tranquil village.

The War I Forgot to Mention

I was twelve years old in 1967. My family was working on our farm east of the village during the summer planting season, when we saw planes in the sky. I was asked to fetch some things from home and on the way, I heard people say, “The war has started.” When I went back to the farm, I forgot to tell them that the war had started.

The next day, young people from the town gathered volunteers to fight in the war. They went to the Hebron Governor’s headquarters asking to be armed but came back empty-handed. People wondered what was happening. They listened to radio broadcasts about the heroic battle in Jerusalem and heard sporadic rumors about the arrival of the Iraqi army, but then they saw with their own eyes Israeli air raids on a withdrawing Jordanian army convoy in the neighboring town of Sa’ir, turning most of the convoy tanks into smoldering hulks.

Some people took refuge in the caves around the village. The children set about playing and smoke soon rose from stoves in the caves. It was as if they were having a family holiday.

The town became a crossroads for fleeing soldiers and civilians heading east towards the Jordan River. It was not long before the Israeli military patrols stormed our village; soldiers wearing netted helmets came in their dusty sand-colored military jeeps and posted flyers on the doors of the shops. We heard that some people were severely beaten. A curfew was imposed on the town so that the Israeli army could conduct a population census.

On November 6, 1967, we experienced the first real meaning of Occupation, when military forces stormed the town in the afternoon and imposed a curfew. Military helicopters hovered east of the town and paratroopers landed in the Al-Bayyada area. Rumors spread about a battle taking place with the fedayeen in the caves of Umm Qarmoul, which lasted about four hours. Martyrs buried at night were turned into legends, and the beautiful image of one of them, Youssef, was etched in our minds.

Next morning, loudspeakers called for all men over the age of sixteen to gather in the vacant lot not far from our house. We did not hear the announcement from our house, and then we did not want to go when we saw, from our windows, the brutal beating of those who arrived late.

Antiquities Fever

After the Occupation, work stopped, and crowds of young unemployed men searched for archaeological material in the nearby ruins. Eyes sparkled when an artifact was found! Things were to such a degree of ease that middlemen traders came to the excavation sites to reap the bargains. This was an indicator of the end of the antiquities protection system. I found a bronze coin, most likely from the Roman period.

The antiquities fever spread stories of treasures and gold. My grandfather told my mother a story about when he was a young man during the British Mandate period and how he found gold pieces in a small basin. He took the pieces to an antiquities shop in Jerusalem to sell them, but the dealer at the shop asked if he had more, and when he said that he did, the dealer asked him to wait, and went to the adjacent room to make a phone call. My grandfather realized that he was calling the police, so he ran away! As he ran, he took off his green headscarf that identified him, and tossed the gold coins left and right into the open fields. I think no archaeologist would guess that these coins had been contaminated and removed from their original archaeological context.

School Days

I attended the town's preparatory and primary schools and the Secondary School of Halhul.

During this period, I became enamored with reading novellas by Arab and foreign writers, including novels from the school's library. I lived the events of these novels in my dreams. I came across the story of Anne Frank and was deeply affected by it, but did not link it to Israel and Zionism. I also obtained a copy of the Palestinian National Charter with its Hebrew translation at a secondhand bookstand in Halhul. That was the first time I saw literature written by the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, over time, I came to understand that the village with its people, who preserve the wisdom handed down to them, was the most important school in my life.

Birzeit: My First University

In 1973, I began attending Birzeit University. I first moved into the student dorms but found that the accommodation there was governed by strict laws, so I decided to move in with a group of colleagues into a house located at the entrance of the town. The house became known as the “Commune.” We later learned that it used to be a base for meetings of revolutionaries before 1948.

That period witnessed the emergence of a new generation as the university became a stronghold for our national movement; the curriculum was arabized and the first student council was established. This was also the period in which municipal elections took place and we saw the emergence of a unified national Palestinian leadership.

I have always been influenced by the ideas of the Peasants’ Revolution and inspired by Frantz Fanon, so my friend, Yasser Ibrahim, and I purchased and collected book donations. We established the first public library in our village, which he ran from a small room in his house.

On one of my visits home, a curfew was imposed, and men were summoned and herded together at a school which I had attended as a child. A crowd of us huddled under the trees, while the army ran their interrogation in the classrooms. When my turn came, I was ordered into the classroom and saw the army interrogator sitting on what used to be my teacher’s chair. He asked about my name, family, work, and when he found out that I was studying at Birzeit, his attention peaked. The interrogator wanted to know who my friends were, and he was not impressed with my vague response. That was when I received a slap in the face from another interrogator who suddenly appeared beside me. I was told to go to the Al-Amara military government building in Hebron the following Wednesday.

At the Al-Amara, the scene was different. The interrogator was sitting at his desk with a pile of files in front of him. After the introductory questions, he said, “Listen, we know everything about you. It’s all in this file in front of me. I advise you to confess.” He said this in a confident tone. I told him that while I was at his office, I was missing out on lectures at the university so, to save both my time and his, he should just read the file. He got angry and told me to leave, warning me that he would be watching me.

In my third year of sociology, I enrolled by chance in “Introduction to Archaeology,” a course taught by Dr. A. Glock, which was offered as part of a minor. I was completely captivated by the new world that it opened up to me. It was as if I had wandered into a cave filled with treasure, the cave of Ali Baba.

This is how an elective minor became central to the course of my future. Immediately after graduation, I took up a job as an academic assistant in the Department of Archaeology, while also completing the university requirements for a double major in archaeology. I participated in training excavations at Tell Jenin and Tell Ta'annek, developed my field work skills and learned more about cultural artifacts, especially pottery which, as Flinders Petrie says, constitutes the alphabet of archaeology. The Jenin excavation camp experience was unique; it led to the emergence of the first locally trained team, and it made us feel that we had the responsibility to dig into our history with our own hands.

Studying at the University of Jordan

I was accepted into a part-time Master’s program at the University of Jordan in 1980 and during my studies, in order to cover the expenses of my stay, I worked as a day laborer for the Jordanian Department of Antiquities in a number of salvage excavations. I also participated in a survey of the Ajloun area together with Robert Jordan. It was during this survey that we received news of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. We were shocked by this ruthless Occupation that terrorized and expelled Palestinians and then chased them as they fled to seek asylum in other countries, only to continue killing them there.

For my Master's thesis, I chose to research the origin and civilization of the Philistines (Taha 1983). My thesis was based on a clear distinction between Philistines and Palestinians, as two distinct terms denoting two divergent historical contexts, despite the linguistic link and despite the fact that the Philistines clearly gave their name to the country. I concluded that the ethnic origin of the Philistines, which was a subject of great controversy among biblical researchers, is not important, and that the real importance rather lies in the cultural continuity of a people.

On my return journey home, I was interrogated at the border crossing. The Israeli interrogator, agitated to see me, barked, “Why have you come back?” I was told to check in at Al-Amara in Hebron for a second round of questioning the following day, which I did. On the third day, our house was shot at, with two bullets going through the window but, fortunately, no one was hurt. During that time, our village was being terrorized by militias affiliated with the Occupation. I returned to lecture at Birzeit University in 1984 and spent a semester at the university until I traveled abroad to study in Germany.

My Studies in Berlin

I was awarded a German Academic Exchange Mission Scholarship and completed a Ph.D. in Archaeology at the Institute of West Asian Archaeology at the Free University of Berlin. I studied German at the Goethe-Institute in Göttingen.

I married Samar Jarrar, whom I met during my studies in Jordan. She joined me in Germany and we had three children there—Dalia and the twins, Suhail and Lubna. My youngest daughter, Noura, was born in Jerusalem after we returned to Palestine. In Germany, I lived in Dahlem Dorf, and often cycled to the university. One day, while browsing through a magazine at the university, I was taken aback to read about the martyrdom of my brother, Abdul Karim. He was 24 years old and had been martyred on Land Day, during the First Intifada.

The topic of my thesis was “Mortuary differentiations in Palestine (Taha 1990) from the Mousterian period until the beginning of urbanization.” It was a new experiment in applying the methodology of mortuary analysis to archaeological artifacts that had been unearthed by hundreds of archaeological excavations in Palestine, including a sample of Middle Bronze Age burials from Tell Ta'annek in what is known as the children's cemetery, which was found under the floors of houses in the Middle Bronze Age. The whole mortuary theory is based on the assumption developed by Saxe (1970), Binford (1972) and others that social differentiation, whether by age, sex, social position etc., is reflected by the mortuary differentiation of the dead.

Coming Home

Again, on my way back home, I was asked at the bridge to go to Al-Amara to be interrogated. I was returning as an adjunct professor at Birzeit University. I was eager to participate in the setting up of the Archaeology program but had to negotiate stifling procedural obstacles. The director of the institute had reservations regarding my ability to teach, believing that I was only fit for research. The case was referred to the university councils and the staff union. An agreement was reached in the office of the late university president, G. Baramki, that I would return to teaching. I was assigned two courses in archaeology. A few days later, I heard the tragic news of the murder of Dr. A. Glock, from whom I had learned a lot, and had worked with, for many years.

Participation in the Negotiations

I was working at the university when Palestinian preparations for the 1992 Madrid Conference began, and I was selected to coordinate an advisory Antiquities Team, one of many technical teams tasked to prepare for the negotiations (Taha 1994d).

I participated in the technical negotiations in Taba where I noticed our plan was not clearly articulated. I prepared an amended paper and informed the head of the Palestinian delegation, Dr. N. Shaath, about this. Later that morning, we met with the Israeli side, and I submitted my amended paper, but the Israeli side insisted on working from the first version which, in my opinion, did not constitute a basis for negotiation. The session was quickly adjourned. In the evening, Dr. N. Kassis whispered to me that the Israelis had accused me of sabotaging the negotiations.

The next session was with Dr. M. Sadiq in Eilat. The discussion stalled during a procedural session over a disagreement about a requirement, listed as point No. 9, which stipulated that the Palestinian Authority needed to obtain Israeli approval to work in a number of archaeological sites. I asked for this provision point to be deleted, but all attempts to reach an agreement on that point failed. On the third day, the Israeli negotiator lost his temper and warned that I would not be allowed to return for future sessions. I registered a complaint and asked for him to be removed, which he was, but the deadlock was not broken, and I was not called to participate at the next session in Cairo, where the agreement was actually signed.

Reclaiming History

The establishment of the Palestinian Department of Antiquities in 1994 was a momentous event. It was viewed as inaugurating the revival of the Department of Antiquities established in 1920, which had been dissolved on account of the Nakba, and marked an official reclaiming of history.

Following the Palestinian-Israeli agreement signed in Oslo in 1993, and the subsequent agreement in 1994, the Palestinian side was given control of several administrative domains, including archaeology in areas designated A and B under the Oslo Accords. There was an understanding that responsibilities in Area C would be transferred gradually to Palestinians, on the understanding that the peace process was to be concluded by May 1999. However, this mutually agreed timetable was never honored by Israel. In the absence of a final peace agreement, Israel, therefore, remains a military occupier in the Palestinian Territories, with responsibilities set out in international law (Taha 1914: 29).

I was appointed Director of the Department of Antiquities on August 10, 1994 and led the process of managing the handover of antiquities offices and employees that had, until then, been part of the Israeli Civil Administration. There was only a small staff working in a handful of offices. Their main responsibility had been to follow up on licensing issues and to serve as an operational base for the Israeli antiquities officer.

Palestinians had inherited, from this period, a negative view of archaeological work, perceiving it to be part of the Occupation, because antiquities were being used as a pretext to confiscate land for settlement purposes, and many settlements had been established on the back of archaeological excavation campaigns, such as Khirbet Siloun, Mount Gerizim, Tell Rumeida, etc.

The new era of archaeology in Palestine began with the work of a small but dedicated and enthusiastic team, who worked out of a field office by the ruins of the ancient Hisham’s Palace in Jericho. This team included Muhammed Ghayada, Youssef Abu Ta’a, Iman Saca, Jihad Yassin, Juliana Neiruz and Iyad Hamdan, among others. We started from scratch, with no qualified personnel, no logistical capacity and no archival or archaeological materials in our custody. The department that we built considered itself a natural extension of the Mandate Department of Antiquities that had ceased to exist in 1948.

The department began work to promote a modern understanding of cultural heritage in Palestine (Taha a-c1994). The new situation after Oslo allowed Palestinians to write the history of Palestine on the basis of its primary sources, a privilege reserved, until recently, for foreign and Israeli archaeologists (Curtis 1994, 1914: 29). The first fieldwork activities began at a small site in Jericho known as Jiser Abu Ghabush (Taha 1994), under the blazing August sun. The team felt empowered, as they were now in charge of their own archaeological sites and writing their own past.

The new Department of Antiquities shouldered a number of responsibilities, including formulating new legislations, training staff in salvage excavation, combating looting of archaeological sites and the illicit trade in antiquities, and building a museum sector (Taha 2014: 31). The department’s founding vision emphasized the role of archaeology as a scientific enterprise, tasked itself to safeguard the integrity of different aspects and layers of cultural heritage and recognized antiquities as a source for sustainable development and an integral part of Palestine’s national cultural identity (Taha 2003).

Writing History Using Primary Sources

The newborn department was involved in archaeological excavations, and it became possible to start the first ambitious project: excavating the Great Water Tunnel at Khirbet Balama (Taha and van der Kooij 2007) alongside a large cluster of tombs from different periods. One of the most notable of these discoveries is the Qabatiya silver coinage collection (Taha and van der Kooij 2006). We gave priority to cleaning up a hundred archaeological sites (Taha 1998) and developing sites that were excavated and abandoned by previous archaeological missions, which had transferred archaeological materials and excavation archives to various European and American museums.

The Formula for Post-colonial Cooperation

I received the first letter of international cooperation from Prof. Paolo Matthiae of the University of Rome La Sapienza, proposing to begin joint cooperation at Tell es-Sultan in Jericho. This venture paved the way for establishing the first model of post-colonial cooperation (Nigro 2006:96). Although Palestine is still under Occupation, excavation permits were replaced by memoranda of understanding based on equality and mutual respect. The colonial principle of appropriating archaeological materials was abolished. The cooperative model was extended to other sites. Most notably, these included joint excavations in Khirbet Balama and Tell Balata with Leiden University in the Netherlands, Palestinian-French excavations in Tell al-Blakhiya, Tell al-Nuseirat and Tell es-Sakan in Gaza, Palestinian-Norwegian excavations at Tell al-Mafjar, Palestinian-American excavations at Hisham’s Palace, and Palestinian-Russian excavations at the Sycamore Tree site in Jericho (Taha 2014).

Dr. D. Baramki had stopped the excavations at Hisham Palace due to the turbulent events in Palestine preceding the Nakba of 1948. My heart pounded when I read in his thesis the following line:

It is hoped that at some future date some enthusiastic person may supply the funds necessary for the resumption and conclusion of the work.

(Baramki 1953: 95)

I began the excavations in 2006 and completed “the work” between 2012–2015, together with Don Whitcomb, working in the area adjacent to the Umayyad Bath and the northern area to expose the Abbasid aspects of the palace (Taha and Whitcomb 2014).

Museums and Galleries

On the understanding that museums play an important role in preserving cultural memory, the new department began the establishment of archaeological and ethnographic museums in Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Tulkarm and Gaza. At the same time, a series of international archaeological exhibitions were organized, including “Mediterranean Gaza,” in Paris in 2000, “Gaza at the Crossroads of Civilizations” in Geneva in 2007 and “Gaza the Gateway to the Sea,” in Oldenburg in 2009 and Stockholm in 2010 (Taha 2014: 38–39). These initiatives were an important component of our efforts to part ways with the model of colonial control over Palestinian cultural institutions (Taha 2021) represented by the pre-1948 Mandate era Palestinian Department of Antiquities and the Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.

Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage

We documented the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, especially in Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus, since the Occupation in 1967, which constituted an extension of the displacement and destruction in 1948 of more than 500 Palestinian villages, together with all their heritage (Taha 2019: 26–28). We also documented the damage inflicted on archaeological sites and historical buildings during successive Israeli assaults on Gaza.

A major challenge that we confronted, as a department, was the threat posed by Israeli settlements constructed in the Palestinian territories since 1967, which control more than 50% of cultural resources in the West Bank and Gaza. The other significant problem was the threat posed to archaeological heritage by Israel’s Separation Wall, including those parts of it built in and around Jerusalem. The Wall separates people from their land and history and has a devastating impact on archaeological sites and cultural landscape (Taha 2014: 37–38).

Archaeology and the Occupation: An Ongoing Debate

Archaeology in Palestine must be viewed as archaeology under Occupation (Taha 2016). It is an arena of struggle between two competing narratives, an indigenous Palestinian narrative, and the settler colonial narrative of Zionism. The Israeli narrative tends to give overwhelming priority to Jewish heritage in Palestine, and to scantily mention Palestine’s non-Jewish and Arab history. At the first International Conference on the Archaeology of the Near East, which was held in 1998 in Rome, the relationship between archaeology and the Occupation was raised, and the conference affirmed its commitment to the stipulation of the UNESCO Charter pertaining to excavations in occupied territories.

One problem that we face as Palestinians is that Israelis fabricate our narratives, sometimes even well-meaning Israelis. As for instance, in an essay criticizing Israeli archaeology, architect Eyal Weizman quoted me as saying something that I had never said, in connection with Israeli excavations at Khirbet Seiloun, controlled by Shiloh settlement. But then, this story was later repeated by an Israeli journalist, now in an incendiary article written after Palestine gained membership in UNESCO, which accused the Palestinian Authority of re-writing Jewish history (Giulio 2011) and constituting a scandal worse than Holocaust denial in the view of the right-wing Israeli archaeologist, G. Barkay. Muddling facts as well as names, the article confused me with the Palestinian poet Mutawakel Taha, who wrote a treatise on the Wailing Wall.

Building an International Network

After Oslo, Palestine became a member of a series of international and regional organizations, including UNESCO, ALECSO and ICESCO. International engagement in Palestine took the form of crises management, rather than offering substantive solutions to the problem of the Occupation.

While attending the International Conference on the Archaeology of the Near East in Rome in 2008, I said, in my closing speech, that the land might be divided for political reasons, but history is indivisible, and this means that Palestine will remain the physical and moral homeland for the Palestinians.

In 2005, Palestine prepared (Taha 2005/2009) a tentative list for World Heritage Sites in Palestine. The list includes twenty sites of cultural and natural heritage. In 2009, the Department of Antiquities began preparing the Bethlehem file (Taha 2012a, 2012b), although Palestine was not yet a regular member in UNESCO. At the 2010 World Heritage Conference in Brazil, the Palestinian delegation refused to be seated until their place was marked with a plaque bearing the name of Palestine, as is the case for other country delegations.

UNESCO’s recognition of Palestine in 2011 culminated a long struggle (Taha 2011, TWIP 2011b). The sites of Bethlehem in 2012, the cultural landscape of Battir in 2014 and the old city of Hebron in 2017, were inscribed on the World Heritage List. UNESCO's recognition of Palestine represented the first official international cultural recognition, which marked the beginning of rectifying part of the historical injustice that has befallen the Palestinian people.

Reconstructing the Past to Build the Future

After my official appointment with the Department of Antiquities ended on November 5, 2014, I turned to the world of research and scholarship. I took on some advisory and teaching work, before I devoted myself to the completion of a publication on the findings of previous excavations (Taha, H. and van der Kooij: 2016) and coordinating “The Palestine History Project,” which involved a group of local and international researchers. This culminated in the publication of a book entitled New Critical Approaches to the History of Palestine (2019).

In my view, the role of archaeology is to reconstruct the past in order to build the future (TWIP 2011a). Palestinians are now contributing, in writing, an inclusive narrative of their history, drawing on primary sources that incorporate the voices of all peoples, groups, cultures and religions that have lived on the land of Palestine, in stark contrast to the exclusivist fantasy advanced by Zionism’s settler colonial narrative. I remain inspired by D. Baramki’s admonition (Baramki 1969: 239) that all archaeological and historical evidence shows that Palestine was inhabited by many peoples, from the early times of Homo sapiens until the twenty-first century and that, over this history which was marked by many wars, invasions and conversions—religious and political—the indigenous population was never completely eliminated. We Palestinians, the indigenous people of this land, have always endured, and this gives us hope in our struggle for liberation from Israel’s settler Occupation and the regime of apartheid that it has established in the land of Palestine.2

1 This essay was originally written in Arabic and was translated by Samah Sabawi.

2 My role would not have been possible without the support of my family, my friends, and the help and efforts of those I worked with on this journey, in particular, my colleagues in the Department of Antiquities and all its partner institutions. Although I am not able to acknowledge all by name, I owe them my thanks and gratitude. A full list of references is in my publications and is available on my website, https://independent.academia.edu/HamdanTaha.