Baruch Halpern, who teaches ancient history at Penn State and co-directs the Megiddo dig, believes his university overreacted when it refused to insure this year's expedition. ''People are pulling out when the likelihood of injury, which is what they're afraid of, is lower than it would be in Detroit.''
Still, Halpern understands the concerns: ''What's important about a pot against a human life?''
A Culture Looted
No excavations have been conducted in Palestinian areas for two years. At least ten digs scheduled for this summer were canceled, says Hamdan Taha, head of the Palestinian Authority's antiquities department in Ramallah. As many as 50 European students were scheduled to come.
Palestinian archaeologists say their biggest concern is not their inability to uncover the past but their powerlessness to prevent looters from stealing it. With 30 percent to 50 percent of the Palestinian workforce unemployed because of Israeli closures, some people are turning to the black market to make money. Palestinian officials say pots, coins, knives and other artifacts scavenged from ancient tombs and buildings often wind up in Jerusalem antiquities shops.
''The level of destruction of archaeological sites has increased dramatically,'' says Adel Yahya of the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange, a scholarly group in Ramallah. ''Places excavated in previous years have been abandoned and are not protected.''
Yahya cannot show visitors the damage because Israeli travel restrictions confine him to Ramallah. Jamal Juma, an assistant who lives outside the city, takes the trip. Climbing up a steep and thorny slope in the village of Al-Jeeb, the site of the biblical city of Gibeon, he steps inside a sixth-century Byzantine church used by Crusaders. Picks, crowbars, electrical cables, lanterns, even a tape measure are strewn beneath the ancient vaulted ceilings. Juma says they were left the night before by thieves who broke through floors and walls, leaving gaping holes and piles of freshly demolished stone. Juma fears the entire structure will collapse if any more damage is done. ''They're destroying their cultural heritage without knowing. And for what? For bread.''
Other Palestinian cultural sites were destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers during the April military offensive. The old casbah of Nablus was among the places hit hardest. A recent report by donor nations and international agencies estimated direct damages of U.S. $114 million, half of that involving ancient public baths, mosques, historic houses and other cultural sites dating back almost 1,000 years.
Not everything has come to a standstill. At Hazor, 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of the Sea of Galilee, Hebrew University archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor plans to resume excavations of a Canaanite royal complex. He says he has no choice.
''I have to be in the field. There are things that we have to do, and they can't be delayed. We have to conserve and preserve a palace, and if we don't do it this year, it won't be there,'' he says of the highly perishable mud-brick structure. ''The palace doesn't wait for politics or peace.''
But Ben-Tor's excavation will be a fraction of the size it would have been in more peaceful times. Instead of 120 American, Swedish and Spanish volunteers shoring up walls and installing support beams, he will rely on 25 veteran volunteers from around the world who have agreed to come at their own risk, as well as ten to 15 paid workers. That is, if he can scrounge up $8,000 in grants to pay them.
Here at Megiddo, volunteers during the millennium digging season wore T-shirts reading ''I survived Armageddon 2000.'' Two years later, the excavation project is barely breathing.
Some 160 volunteers, most from the USA, decided not to come this summer. Instead of employing 30 Israeli doctoral students and technicians to analyze artifacts, the project will hire six. A skeleton crew of 30 Tel Aviv University students will dig at two small sites, instead of the six originally planned.
Megiddo Will Have to Wait
Archaeologists here have uncovered fortifications, gates, inscriptions and hoards of ivory in the stratified remains of 20 distinct historical periods from 4000 B.C. to 400 B.C. But the two most important sites will lay untouched this summer:
• An Israelite palace that Finkelstein and other archaeologists have dated to the ninth-century B.C. reign of Ahab, king of the northern tribes of Israel. An earlier expedition had placed the remains in the 10th century B.C., during Solomon's united rule over the north and the southern Kingdom of Judah.
If the controversial interpretation, which relies on carbon dating and other modern archaeological techniques, is correct, it means that the biblical ''10 lost tribes'' of the north constituted ''the great state'' in ancient Israel and not, as the Hebrew Bible asserts, the southern monarchy based around Jerusalem.
• A Canaanite temple complex from 3100 B.C. Finkelstein says it ''tells us a lot about the earliest urbanization process in the Middle East. If you want to understand how the first cities emerged in the late fourth millennium, you have to go to Megiddo.''
Perhaps, but Margaret Cohen, a Penn State doctoral student, won't. This was to have been her third season at Megiddo. Instead, she'll do research in a library near her parents' home in Florida.
''These ruins have been there for thousands of years. They'll certainly wait another year or two,'' says Cohen, 27. But ''peace will bring more fieldwork, more discoveries, more understanding, while this war brings nothing. Hopefully, we'll all be back in the field next season.''
Copyright 2002 USA Today
