Unrest in Middle East sets back archaeological research_92004

Posted: 9/17/04

Unrest in Middle East sets back archaeological research

By Michelle Chabin

Religion News Service

JERUSALEM–Since the start of the Palestinian uprising four years ago, local archaeologists, many of them working on sites alluded to in the Bible, have had to scale back or even cancel their digs.

That's because the threat of continued violence has kept foreign professors and students from providing assistance at large digs.

Twin bus bombings that killed 16 people in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba last month did nothing to calm skittish scholars and nervous insurance companies. But archaeologists still are hopeful the attraction of biblical history–especially the discovery of a cave said to be John the Baptist's–will lure academics and tourists alike.

“The intifada has definitely had an effect on Israeli archaeology, including our dig,” said Shimon Gibson, the archaeologist who excavated the “John the Baptist cave.”

Gibson announced in mid-August that he had found a cave he believes John the Baptist used to immerse some of his followers. The news received international media attention.

Then came more bus bombings.

“Prior to the intifada we had many students from the (United) States,” Gibson said. “When the intifada began, the U.S. State Department advised Americans not to travel here, and ever since then we've had to rely on smaller and smaller groups. It's been a bit of a nightmare, actually.”

A major problem is that American institutions, especially federally funded ones, find it difficult to obtain insurance for anyone they send to the region, said Gideon Avni, director of the excavations service department at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

From the mid-1990s through the year 2000, Avni said, about 45 foreign academic institutions, two-thirds of them American, ran or co-ran digs in Israel. That number dwindled to five in 2003.

With a lull in the violence before the bus bombings, the situation improved.

“We have 12 American excavations,” said Avni. “We hope the trend will continue despite the recent attacks.”

Avni stressed that even when the foreigners stopped coming, Israeli teams tried to persevere. Even during the intifada years, he said, Israelis carried out 15 to 20 large-scale excavations and about 200 mostly short-term “rescue” digs on sites uncovered in the course of modern-day sewer repairs and road construction.

Gibson, a senior fellow at the American Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, said he managed to continue his dig because the cave he excavated is so small, fitting only 20 workers at a time.

For larger digs, needing 100 or more people, “the lack of volunteers was disastrous,” Gibson said.

To compensate for the loss of his younger university students, Gibson began to use the services of older volunteers from the United States and Europe as well as Israeli volunteers of all ages.

While the excavations have suffered, so have archaeology students.

“For the first time,” said Gibson, “students studying the archaeology of Israel aren't always able to gain field experience. How can a student learn how to excavate unless he's actually doing it?”

Some of the last foreign students to help Gibson hailed from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“The intifada forced us to make some adjustments,” said James Tabor, a University of North Carolina archaeologist who helped excavate the John the Baptist cave. “In 2001, even after the intifada began, we sent students to Israel, but only those over the age of 21. They made their own decision as adults and we required them to procure their own insurance and to sign a waiver of liability.”

Tabor reluctantly decided not to send students in 2002–young or old–“because my classes have students of all ages and limiting Israeli excavations to those over 21 was problematic. … Personally, I travel to Israel often and feel quite safe.”

Each year between 1974 and 2000, Baylor University sent anywhere from 25 to 50 students –graduate and undergraduate–to Israel, and the school sponsored its own excavations, said Lynn Tatum, associate director of Middle East studies at Baylor. Those trips stopped when the intifada started, and Tatum can't imagine the school resuming them anytime in the near future.

“Parents aren't about to send students off to the Middle East,” he said, noting the unrest extends beyond Israel to include much of the ancient world.

The ends result will be a “generation gap” in scholarship, Tatum asserted. Not only will universities cease to produce future archaeologists, but religion students also will be denied the opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of the Holy Land.

Tommy Brisco, dean of Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology, agreed students are the losers when they are unable to participate in excavations and see Holy Land sites first-hand.

“If they are training to be archaeologists, there is no substitute for field work,” he said. “There's only so much we can do in the classroom.”

Unrest in the Middle East not only means fewer students participating in archaeological digs, but also fewer students participating in Holy Land tours, he noted.

“Fewer students are traveling in the lands of the Bible,” he said. “What they miss is having the opportunity to experience the lay of the land and the environment and to visit the great sites. There's no substitute for that.”

Of course, not all archaeological research has halted in the Holy Land. Excavations at the northern fortress of Megiddo, the great biblical battlefield, managed to continue “because we had Israeli students and some paid volunteers from the Parks Authority,” said Yisrael Finkelstein, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist who has been excavating the site for years.

When the number of excavators dropped from 200 in 2000 to just 50 in 2002, “we considered stopping the dig,” Finkelstein said. “It was that bad. But then we decided that if the Israeli people could go on with their lives during this time, we would, too.”

Some excavations that managed to survive the intifada years have unearthed some remarkable finds. In June, an Israeli team discovered what is believed to be the biblical pool of Siloam, the main water reservoir for Jerusalem dwellers two millennia ago. It is fed by the nearby Gihon Spring, which has been under excavation for decades.

Even so, biblical archaeology is poorer due to unrest in the Middle East and the surrounding region, Brisco noted, adding that war in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan also have taken a toll.

“There has been looting of some archaeological sites, and some museums have been plundered,” he noted.

“And it's been harmed by the American war effort, careful as the military may try to be. Bombs don't know the difference between an archaeological site and a mountain.”

With additional reporting by Managing Editor Ken Camp