This book deals with the thorny issue of how archaeology has been and is conducted in Jerusalem, home to the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the monuments sacred to them, and the city at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It explores the motivations of those doing the excavating, the effects their actions have had, both intentional and unintentional, and the effects on our understanding of Jerusalem’s past. It also explores how cultural heritage has been hijacked and manipulated by various political and ideological factions, each wanting to control Jerusalem’s narrative, and how the inhabitants of the city have been excluded from participating in the discovery of the history and heritage of their home. It is an extremely important book, and I am very glad it was written by someone who knows how to write and who has a wide readership.

The book begins with a schematic map of the Middle East, with an insert close-up of the southern Levant. After a brief Author’s Note comes the Introduction, which is announced with a map of the Old City of Jerusalem, the platform of the Haram ash-Sharif / Temple Mount / Har HaBayit and its environs, with the main sites of interest marked. This is a very necessary and detailed introduction in which Lawler sets out his stall, and describes the conventions he has settled on for place and site names. He also explains that for the greater part of the book, because of an enduring historical imbalance in representation, the vast majority of voices are those of outsiders—British, French, Ottoman, as well as European and American immigrants to the region, rather than the voices of the Jewish, Armenian, or Arab residents of Jerusalem and its environs.

The book is then divided into three parts, covering the last 160 or so years of exploration in Jerusalem. The first part deals with the largest time span, beginning in the Ottoman period in 1850 and ending with the Six Day War in 1967. It opens with the French senator Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy’s exploration of the Tombs of the Kings outside the Old City, before exploring in some detail Charles Warren’s work for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) around the Haram ash-Sharif and the Ophel Ridge, Bliss and Dickie’s continuation of that exploration in the 1890s, and the notorious Parker expedition of 1909–1911, which trespassed within the walls of the Haram itself and nearly caused a war. Lawler then looks at archaeology during the British Mandate period from 1919 to 1948 and examines in particular the professional structures and organisations that emerged to control archaeological exploration and to encourage scholarship in the region. These include the establishment of the Department of Antiquities, the Rockefeller Museum, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem. Kathleen Kenyon and Père de Vaux’s excavations in and around the Old City are a particular focus.

Parts 2 and 3 investigate archaeology in the city under Israeli control, starting with the destruction of the historic Maghrebi Quarter to open up the Western Wall Plaza, and Benjamin Mazar’s excavations around the Temple Mount, and continuing to include the Tunnel Project along the Western Wall, the City of David and Givati Parking Lot excavations run by ELAD in Silwan south of the Old City, the Waqf’s controversial rehabilitation of the Marwani prayer space within Solomon’s Stables on the Haram ash-Sharif, and the subsequent controversial Sifting Project that arose out of it. As the story progresses, the entanglement

PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY with politics and ideologies grows ever greater. The three parts are further subdivided into several chapters, each of which explores a particular project, or sites of investigation, and is furnished with a map of the Old City, showing the location of the sites in question. These recurring maps are one of my favourite features of the book. They help to orientate the reader and keep them focused on the particular story the chapter concerns itself with.

Familiar names to the student of the history of Jerusalem’s exploration appear throughout: de Saulcy, Charles Warren, Conrad Schick, the Palestine Exploration Fund, the École Biblique, Père Vincent, Kathleen Kenyon, and Israeli archaeologists such as Benjamin and Eilat Mazar, Gabriel Barkay, Dan Bahat, Israel Finkelstein, Ronnie Reich, and Rafi Greenberg.

Then there are religious leaders like Rabbis Getz, Yosef, and Goren, and the members of the Waqf, the custodians of the Haram ash-Sharif and the Islamic holy places contained within. And of course, there are political figures such as Yitzak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Bill Clinton, Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu. What is significant is the way that Lawler tells these stories together, demonstrating how the actions, beliefs and opinions of the early explorers have influenced later practitioners, to create an enduring narrative which, never mind what really lies beneath, has been manipulated and exploited for various goals.

Palestinian and Arab voices are rare, not by design but because of the imbalance the author describes in the introduction. As time progresses, they play an increasingly important role, and we hear not just from the Waqf and the PLO, but from Palestinian archaeologists Namzi Jubeh, Ehab Jallab, and Hani Nur el-Din, as well as residents including Abdek Salam Hirbawi, (whose cellar near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City was the cause of a major argument between his family and the monks of the Church in the 1980s), and Miriam Bashir, whose house in Silwan is, like so many others, slowly becoming uninhabitable due to subsidence.

Jerusalem’s story is immensely complex, but Lawler deftly weaves the numerous threads together to present us with a very comprehensive tapestry. What he reveals is that despite the momentous changes which have taken place over the last 160 or so years covered here, there is a surprising continuity of several themes which reveal themselves as the book progresses. Altogether, these themes present an unflattering portrait of archaeological practice in Jerusalem from the early work of former colonial powers, the French, Ottomans, and the British up to 1914, through the new era of colonial rule of the British Mandate (1918– 1948), and finally into the modern era of Israeli control and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Tunnelling is a method of revealing Jerusalem’s past out of sight of its residents. Introduced by Warren in the 19th century, it has been continued by successive excavators ever since. It is not regarded today as good archaeological practice, and would not be countenanced elsewhere. But in Jerusalem, the desire to reveal its biblical past at any cost and by any means overrides other concerns. The same could be said of the use of bulldozers—not the most delicate item in the archaeologist’s toolbox, but apparently fine in Jerusalem, if used with care (pp. 142–46).

Religious belief has been a huge feature of most activities from the outset. All of the various agencies have, to varying degrees, favoured biblical eras over those earlier and, especially, later, an imbalance which exists even now. It has undoubtedly resulted in the destruction of a huge amount of Late Antiquity and Medieval archaeology. These religious beliefs have also been harnessed by political agendas, whether Christian colonialist, or Jewish Zionist.

Both are linked, and both have resulted in the local population having been side-lined from the exploration and explanation of Jerusalem’s past, in favour of producing a particular narrative that supports a political or ideological interpretation.

This is perhaps the saddest theme that Lawler draws out. In all periods, the local population has been systematically ignored and cut out of the archaeological conversation happening on its doorstep. This has resulted in and enduring mistrust of archaeology and archaeologists, and a flourishing illicit antiquities trade, which today the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), through its lax antiquities laws, cannot hope to effectively control. This exclusive approach began as a feature of a colonial world view, where local residents were seen as a source of labour, and as facilitators, but as little else. Here, de Saulcy, Warren, and others are guilty as charged. Despite the political changes of the 20th century this approach has been sustained, and continues today, with Arab labour supplying much of the muscle for the excavations taking place around and beneath Jerusalem. Whilst this model offers employment and involvement, it is not agency, and these workers and residents have little say in the interpretation, or the narrative produced, or indeed in the economic benefits of the tourism resulting from the archaeology. Hopefully, with the emergence of professional Palestinian archaeologists in recent years, and archaeological courses gaining traction at universities such as Al Quds and Birzeit, this will change to some extent at least.

Lawler investigates the fissures in the various Christian and Jewish communities that have a bearing on the archaeology of Jerusalem, which the outsider may be less aware of. He skilfully brings out some of the profound differences of opinion that have existed within different sectors of Jewish and Israeli communities: fears that archaeology might ‘uncover the truth’ and demolish religion-based claims to Jerusalem, fears that archaeologists might, through their work, desecrate Jewish graves, as well as a secular Zionist desire to use archaeology to uncover proof of the city’s ‘Jewish past’.

As the book approaches the near past and present, Lawler plots the growing power of extreme right-wing Zionism characterised by Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which began to ‘flex its muscles’ in the 1990s, just as an attempt at bringing about peace was made with the Oslo Accords. With the right-wing taking charge in Israel, settler organisations such as ELAD, with funding support from outside Israel, also began to take a far more active—and controversial—role in the politics and the archaeology of Jerusalem whereby archaeology is used to change the city’s demographic and to control the narrative of its past. This can be seen particularly clearly in ELAD’s City of David project, which presents the visitor with a clear and compelling, but ultimately fictitious, vision of a Jerusalem where Judaism is the primary cultural influence of significance, and dominates, unfettered with the complex realities of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic past and present.

At the same time, Arab leaders have sought to counteract a ‘Jewish identity’ in Jerusalem by claiming that—despite very compelling evidence to the contrary—the Temple was not where the Haram ash-Sharif now stands, but was located elsewhere, perhaps even outside Jerusalem altogether. Whilst this idea has not attracted as much traction in the wider world as the agenda of the settler movement, it is important to realise that propaganda is not the exclusive tool of one side or the other.

Under numerous international laws and rules (the Hague Convention and its two protocols; 1970 UNESCO; 1995 UNIDROIT), it is considered illegal to excavate in any territory that is in dispute. Archaeological projects did not, however, stop in 1967: if anything, they have increased in frequency and ambition. Because of the hectic pace of activity, and the increasing involvement of the Israel Antiquities Authority, even in areas it would have previously steered clear of, it is easy to forget that all this work, where it takes place in areas under occupation, remains illegal under International Law. These are laws and conventions that the State of Israel does not recognise, and instead it sees the jurisdiction of the IAA as sovereign throughout, except on the Haram ash-Sharif itself where the Waqf is in control. It is important to understand that this does not mean that these laws do not exist; they are just continually broken in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

This issue of International Law as applied to excavation in occupied territories is brought up only once in the book. Perhaps the author felt it should be handled with a light touch, but personally, I feel it could have been given more weight, as it is so pertinent, if not critical to the subject.

The power of Lawler’s account increases as we get closer to the present day. He is a journalist, and his talent for journalism is on display, especially in the latter part of the book. His text is full of first-hand accounts from those involved—the archaeologists, sometimes those connected with the political power-players in Jerusalem and in Washington, and occasionally those who are directly affected by the archaeology and the politics being carried out both above and below them. These first-hand accounts give the book an immediacy and honesty which is quite gripping. Lawler has spent a great deal of time cultivating relationships with those people who are central to the story, and the book is all the better for it.

The book is not without its flaws: there is very little mention of the American, French and German interests in Jerusalem in the Ottoman period, beyond occasional references to the wider political jostling of the so-called ‘Great Game’, and whilst we occasionally hear of the involvement of the École Biblique, there is hardly mention beyond acknowledgement of the American Schools of Oriental Research which exist today as the Albright Institute in Sheikh Jarrah, north of the Old City. Granted, their involvement in the archaeology of Jerusalem has not been so direct, but they were, and remain, a part of the archaeological community resident in the city.

There are also errors in the characterisation of some organisations, such as the American Colony of the Spafford family, which Lawler describes as a group of missionaries, whereas, in reality, the family had not come to Jerusalem to proselytise, but rather to heal through work in the aftermath of terrible tragedies. The PEF is almost a character in its own right in Lawler’s book and is portrayed as an organisation, the committee and membership of which were entirely motivated and driven by an exclusive interest in the Bible, through which it might serve colonial interests. It is true that biblical concerns featured heavily in the PEF’s early days; yet, it seems this was much more to do with how the founders understood the means by which they could attract funding and support than anything else. The PEF’s interests were far broader, as a look at the pages of the PEF Quarterly Statement (today’s PEQ) will show, and it always walked something of a tightrope between balancing its own, broad, scholarship-driven agenda with the expectations of its membership, which, by and large, was more biblically orientated than its core committee. At the PEF’s inaugural meeting in June 1865, the Rev. H. B. Tristram (very much a Darwinian) was at pains to promote the study of the region’s natural history for its own sake, because it was interesting (Proceedings and Notes of the Palestine Exploration Fund 1865, p. 15), and G. Gilbert Scott Esq., R.A., included the architecture of Classical, Byzantine and Islamic periods in his discussion, and called for excavators to take account of the debris in which the architecture was embedded (Proceedings and Notes, p. 22). The PEF also employed William Flinders Petrie to excavate on its behalf Tell el-Hesi in the 1890s which Lawler refers to, and at which Palestine’s pre-classical past was first given some structure. Indeed, it was the scientific methodology employed by Petrie at Hesi that laid the stratigraphic foundations for all subsequent, competent excavation work in Palestine and beyond.

When, later, the British School of Archaeology (BSAJ) was founded at the beginning of the British Mandate in 1919, Lawler describes it thus: ‘Unlike the Palestinian [sic] Exploration Fund, the organisation [the BSAJ] would seek more than biblical remains’ (p. 120–21). Then, he goes on to list its interest in ‘Canaanite, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Medieval periods’ and its characteristic as a non-religious and non-political body. However, he could almost be quoting, in slightly modernised language, from the 1865 prospectus of the PEF! This of course makes perfect sense, as the PEF was very much behind the establishment of the BSAJ in Jerusalem. Both organisations seem to have been unrealistically naïve about steering clear of controversy and politics and their academic motivations were very similar. At the time of its establishment, the only difference was that the BSAJ had no covert colonial role because, at this point, Britain had colonised Palestine. The BSAJ did not need to keep its supporters interested with biblical material because it was funded directly by the British government. Lawler’s representation of the PEF through this narrow, ‘biblically infected’ viewfinder is irritating, but does it matter? Well, yes, because the PEF plays such a large part in the narrative of the book particularly in the first part, but throughout as its influence endures.

The challenge to the biblical interpretation of Jerusalem’s past, and in particular the period relating to the ‘United Monarchy’ of David and Solomon is discussed. In Lawler’s account, the main challenge is laid down by Israel Finkelstein. It is inaccurate to suggest that it was Finkelstein alone who made others question the chronology based on the biblical narratives. There have been many who have, more generally, questioned the relationship between biblical history and archaeological reality. To mention just two: Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho in the 1950s made a new scepticism possible, as did the publication of Thomas Thompson’s Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives in the 1970s. I think the significant point is that Finkelstein was the first Israeli archaeologist to openly question biblical chronology, and by so doing made it harder for the inconsistencies to be ignored by Israeli archaeology.

Finally, right at the beginning of the book, in the introduction, Lawler makes a distinction between the archaeology of an inhabited city like Jerusalem and abandoned tells like that of Jericho. He is right, of course. Excavating any currently inhabited site comes with added complexity, and Jerusalem is as complex as it gets, but to describe Middle Eastern tells as ‘high mounds resembling layer cakes, with the old neatly stacked beneath the more recent’ (p. xxvi) is over-simplifying to say the least. I can almost hear a collective sharp intake of breath from the excavators of such sites.

These criticisms aside, Andrew Lawler has written an extremely powerful, honest, and important book. With great clarity and skill, he takes the reader on a tour through Jerusalem’s labyrinthine subterranean world, and amazingly, despite the almost unbelievable complexities of the story, he never loses his way. This book should be read by every person interested in the cultural heritage of Jerusalem and the region, its past, present, and future.

References

Kenyon, K., & Holland, T. A., 1960–1983. Excavations at Jericho 1952–58, Vols. 1–5. BSAJ.

Palestine Exploration Fund, 1865. Proceedings and Notes of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Vol. 1. Thompson, T. L., 1975. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. De Gruyter.

Felicity Cobbing