‘Archaeology has never been edited’
An interesting series of lectures is under way at Columbia University, where the local branch of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East has arranged for some notable scholars with expertise in the history and archaeology of ancient Israel to speak on aspects of the archaeology of the Holy Land. Although no-one involved actually comes out and says so, this is at least partly a response to the controversy over Nadia Abu El Haj and Facts on the Ground - and as a response it is admirable, far better than the misleading petitions and anonymous smear sites favoured by some who dislike Abu El Haj’s arguments.
The second lecture was given by the very distinguished archaeologist William Dever, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona, on Monday. I have not seen the full text of his address, but (thanks to PaleoJudaica) I have read an account of the lecture in Forward. Towards the end of the Forward article, the following is attributed to Professor Dever:
‘Archaeology has never been edited,’ he said. ‘When we dig these things up, they are pristine.’[1]
Perhaps he didn’t say quite that, or perhaps the context qualifies the statement in some way. But, on the face of it, this claim is absurd. Archaeology is not the things that are dug up; it is what is done with them after they have been dug up. Archaeology is deciding where and how to dig, selecting what among the things dug up is important, subjecting those things to interpretation, and disseminating those interpretations. No stage in that process is value-free, and if anything really is ‘pristine’ when it goes into it, it certainly isn’t by the time it comes out. After all, if the things that are dug from the ground are sufficient in and of themselves, why have archaeologists at all?
Three-quarters of a century ago, archaeologists felt able to say things like this:
The disinterestedness of archaeological evidence should also be emphasized. No one questions its utter impartiality … There is no biased note in its attestation, no prejudiced tinge in its evidence. What it vouches for belongs in the realm of fact.[2]
This comes from an article by the American archaeologist Raymond P. Dougherty entitled ‘The scope of Biblical archaeology’, published in the Journal of Religion in July 1930. More than seventy years later Professor Dever (if represented correctly in the quote above) seems to be saying precisely the same thing.
Flawed and tendentious Facts on the Ground may be; but perhaps archaeology does need Nadia Abu El Haj and her critique of ‘Archaeological relics … fetishized as unmediated empirical evidence’[3] after all.
Notes
[1] Marissa Brostoff, ‘Archaeologists challenge Barnard professor’s claims’, Forward, 17 October 2007.
[2] Raymond P. Dougherty, ‘The scope of Biblical archaeology’, The Journal of Religion, vol. 10, no. 3 (July 1930), pp. 338-9.
[3] Nadia Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 79.
[UPDATE 21 October 2007: ‘anon’ has left an important comment on this post which you need to read alongside my observations above.]
[UPDATE 23 October 2007: here is an interesting comment by G. Ernest Wright (1909-74), one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century ‘Biblical archaeology’, which I thought was worth adding as an addendum to my posting above. It is from the September 1971 issue of The Biblical Archaeologist, the journal which Wright founded in 1934:
With regard to Biblical events, however, it cannot be overstressed that the archaeological data are mute. Fragmentary ruins, preserving only a tiny fraction of the full picture of ancient life, cannot speak without someone asking questions of them. And the kind of questions asked are part and parcel of the ‘answers’ heard because of predispositions on the part of the questioner.
Of course, it is a long way from accepting that predisposition and other forms of subjectivity influence the interpretation of archaeological evidence to believing that any interpretation is as good as any other. (Full reference: G. Ernest Wright, ‘What archaeology can and cannot do’, The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 34, no. 3 (September 1971), pp. 69-76, here p. 72.)]
October 21st, 2007 at 02:10 am
I was at the lecture, and if Dever said this it must have been to a reporter before or afterwards.
The lecture was a wonderful treatment of the subject of his recent book did God Have a Wife?
He was more than aware that interpretations change over time, in fact, he discussed several that have. When he was young, the idea that the God of the Jews started out as a god with a consort whose worshippers, at best, practiced monolatry was not widely accepted then, and the objects we now interpret as Asherahs were interpreted otherwise.
But I think it is imorotant to inform nonprofessionals reading your blog that the possible interpretations of such objects is not limitless.
I also suspect that there may be a language or generational language gap here. In discussing a small, clay figurine of a female with a Hathor wig and pronounced triangular pubic area, do we use the word fact? A scholar of Dever’s age might. But Dever and other scholars of his calibre have always bee open to evidence that might, for example, demonstrate the it might be associated with a cult other than Ashera. On Monday, Dever spent some time discussing the varying interpretations of the discs that Asheras from the Israelite cultural area commonly hold.
the other thing that it is important to keep in view is that if a dig is best-practice, the provenance and location of all finds will be well-documented, the objects will be photographed, sketched, described and preserved in a manner that will enable not only non-participannts but future scholars to make interpretations of their own.