Archaeology Conditions Nearly Desperate in Mideast

By Andrea Stone
for USA Today in Megiddo, Israel

June 20, 2002

The New Testament says this peaceful rise overlooking the lush Jezreel
Valley is the site of Armageddon, the last great battle between good and
evil at the end of days.

Biblical scholars surmise that the author of the Book of Revelation placed the ultimate conflict at this crossroad between Egypt and Mesopotamia because many real battles were fought here. The latest conflict at this site was to be a war of words: Archaeologists had planned to renew a debate this month over whether the Hebrew Bible's King Solomon ruled over a great united kingdom or something much smaller. But on June 5, a car bomb blew up a bus near here, killing 17 people. It was the latest reminder of a modern-day apocalypse: the 21-month Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Virtually no foreign archaeological expeditions will travel to the Holy Land for this year's summer excavation season, a situation archaeologists say is unprecedented since Israel was founded in 1948. Of more than 25 scheduled university-sponsored excavations, all but three have been canceled. The remaining three digs have been severely scaled back. No American groups, which account for 80 percent of the 1,200 to 1,500 foreign volunteers who usually dig in Israel each year, are coming.

''This is the worst season in 50 years,'' says Israel Finkelstein, who directs the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. For the first time since he began digging here in 1992, Finkelstein has been forced to cancel excavations in Megiddo.

In the West Bank and Gaza, where there are thousands of historical sites, archaeological conditions verge on desperate. Palestinian officials say the collapse of the economy and disintegration of Yasser Arafat's security forces have fueled looting by people who have no other way to make money. Israel's recent military offensive in the West Bank aimed at arresting suspected militants damaged cultural sites in several Palestinian cities.

No one here says these setbacks to archaeological research and preservation can be compared to the destruction wrought by suicide bombings and military sieges. But the violence has rocked the archaeological community in ways that reverberate around the world. Israel and the Palestinian territories—the crossroads of ancient civilizations and cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam—are the world's most densely excavated areas. Ancient ruins and biblical history are the bedrock of Israel's tourism industry, which has plummeted to almost nothing since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.

''Nobody lives and dies by archaeological research,'' says Seymour Gitin, director of Jerusalem's W. F. Albright Institute. The institute was the first U.S. archaeological research center in the Middle East when it was founded in 1900 as the American School for Oriental Research. ''But this inhibits the acquisition of new knowledge.''

With the exception of world wars, European and American archaeologists have been digging almost without interruption in what are now Israel and the Palestinian territories for 150 years. They dominated the field until their Israeli counterparts began catching up in the '60s. But half of all excavations that don't involve rescuing structures and artifacts uncovered by developers are co-sponsored by foreign universities and research groups working alone or with Israeli partners. Most are U.S. institutions such as Harvard, which canceled a major excavation at Ashkelon, site of an early Philistine seaport. Penn State co-sponsors the Megiddo dig.

All the projects rely on unpaid volunteers who use pickaxes, brushes and dental tools to do the backbreaking and time-consuming work of excavation. Most are students majoring in ancient history or archaeology. They pay as much as U.S. $2,500 to work up to eight weeks for experience and college credit. ''These are serious students,'' not tourists, says Finkelstein. ''They attend lectures, are taught how to dig, learn the history. Those specializing in biblical archaeology need to come here.''

This year, most are heeding U.S. State Department warnings against travel to the Middle East. A few Indiana Jones wannabes will come on their own, but experts say the schools have balked at higher insurance premiums and fear lawsuits if a student is injured or killed in an attack.

In fact, most digs are in rural areas far from suicide attacks and military operations. Yet expedition directors concede that students could be at risk during their off-hours, when they sightsee and party in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other targeted cities.

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