We're so focused on politics, I'm going to shift gears for a sec for variety's sake and offer up this guest post by my good friend & archaeologist who'll go unnamed for now as this is his toe-dipping into the blogosphere and he doesn't have a handle yet. /scampers away impishly/

Anyway, I thought it might be fun for some of you to think about how all these political matters we discuss have and continue to have an impact on other worlds; my friend will write a more "political" post later but wanted to contextualize himself and his world first for you. Not all of the below is directly the professional opinion of the author, but certainly reflects a mainstream academic view of the topic.

Excavating Islam from Middle East politics

Islamic archaeology is a relatively new field that has received very little attention, by contrast with its contemporary, the archaeology of medieval Europe. In light of an increased global interest in all things Islam and a perception that Islamic culture is equally part of the long tradition of human history in the Middle East which extends more than 10,000 years, the study of Islam through its material culture, is now a growing field that is slowly gaining acceptance in the Middle East. However, the practice of Islamic archaeology has not always been widely accepted. Furthermore, this has, unsurprisingly been tied in to the political climate of the Middle East. An article by Andrew Peterson, “Politics and narratives: Islamic archaeology in Israel”, appearing in a 2005 four part special on the field in the UK-based academic journal Antiquity (2005: Vol. 79, No. 306, pp. 858-863), addresses Islamic archaeology and its practice in Israel in a case study that focuses on the history and current state of the field in light of political ideologies and historical narratives of Israeli Zionism and Palestinian identity.

Until only very recently, politics and perceptions of national identity have impeded the practice of Islamic archaeology in Israel. I will summarize the main points of the paper by first outlining the differing Israeli and Palestinian general political ideologies as they relate to the practice of Islamic archaeology.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been reduced in current media representation as daily routine aggression which often lacks a historical framework of opposition. The founder of early Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), first linked the founding of Israel with a return of the Jewish people back to their biblical and ancestral home. Since then, Zionism has been integrated into Israeli political ideology in a manner virtually unchanged since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Although explicitly not promoters of religious Judaism, Zionists have used archaeology to legitimize the Jewish presence in Israel by providing scientific and localized evidence for the biblical narratives.

Furthermore, several prominent politicians have been directly involved in the archaeology of Israel, whether as archaeologists themselves or collectors of antiquities. By contrast, Palestinian ideology has shifted significantly since the post-Ottoman period. The Palestinians originally promoted secular leadership and governance in the 1920’s and 1930’s and during and following World War II, joined the Arab Nationalist cause with its neighbors. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Palestinians adopted a stance of revolutionary socialism which eventually gave way in the 1980’s to a religious ideology with the advent of the Hamas party. Until only last year, continuing change of the ideology of the Palestinians is apparent with the change from the more inclusive and less religious (but anti-Zionist) Fatah party to the newly elected and Hamas party, which has heavily promoted religious motivations in the new Palestinian identity.

With regard to historical narrative, the Palestinians have not used archaeology to further their own political ideologies. Rather, they have used ethnic anthropological links to create a living history, which incorporates traditional Palestinian lifestyles and collective cultural memories to link political legitimization with a not too distant past. In the context of differing historical claims of Zionists/Israelis who promoted ‘Jewish’ and biblical archaeology and Palestinians who embraced a more recent ethnic and living history, the field of Islamic archaeology has received very little attention.

Out of the political discourse, several factors specifically relating to the field, have further sublimated the practice of Islamic archaeology in Israel. Firstly, Islamic archaeology is absent from academics and university programs of study. University programs cover the history of the region up to the Byzantine period, just before the seventh century CE Islamic conquest of Palestine which is implicitly seen as an end of the classical age and by extension, western civilization in the Middle East. Secondly, archaeologists only excavate Islamic period remains when they wish to get at the earlier materials underneath, and these excavations of the Islamic layers are often bulldozed arbitrarily, rather than excavated using the stratigraphic methodology of the field. Petersen, the author of the article, contends that although these qualities are standard in the practice of Islamic archaeology everywhere, he asserts that in Israel, Islamic archaeology is omitted, ignored, and destroyed on a more conscious and deliberate level, rather than just a negligent one. However, the study of the archaeology of Islamic Palestine (the province of al-Filastin) is ideal, not only for the region but also for the understanding of Islamic culture as a whole for three reasons.

As one of the first areas conquered by the Muslims, the Islamic heritage of Palestine is long and involved, including surviving historical buildings and continuing Islamic occupation at most archaeological sites, not least of which, is Jerusalem, the sacred site of Muhammad’s night journey. In the earliest periods of Islam, Jerusalem, like Mecca, was also the focus of the direction of prayer (qibla). Secondly, the government archaeology ministry, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), was formed out of the interests of the British Mandate government, and as such, is not imbued with the Zionist ideologies purveyed by university programs (although some of its archaeologists may be trained otherwise). The IAA’s Archaeological Survey of Israel has undertaken a comprehensive survey of the entire country piece by piece. Most relevant is the area of the Negev (the southern desert region) which showed extensive rural Islamic settlement. This has refuted the ideological claims of Zionists who asserted that the region, following the Muslim conquest, was abandoned and not resettled until the early Zionists ‘tamed the land’.

Such claims by governments are frequent and we need look no further than early US settlement policy on Native American lands, perceived by Frederick Jackson Turner and others as an empty land, an uncivilized wilderness frontier. Thirdly, several important Israeli historians of Islam have paved the way for the inclusion of Islamic archaeology. Most notable of these was the eminent Islamic historian L.A. Mayer, who began as an archaeologist and recorded all of the important Islamic sites in Israel just after 1948, predicting their precarious preservation.

The Islamic city of Ramla, founded in the eighth century as a regional capital and the only new foundation established by the Muslims, is a case study of an individual Islamic site excavated by Israeli archaeologists as “new historians challenging Zionist/Israeli narrative history.” The city is truly an Islamic settlement, founded around 715 CE and continuing until the early twentieth century when it was both intentionally bombarded and indirectly abandoned via the government policies of the newly established Israeli state. Again, Peterson contends that this was a deliberate manifestation of Zionist/Israeli ideology.

Excavations at Ramla in 1949, 1973, and the 1990’s were mainly isolated and salvage work designed to test the land for the construction of new urban development and put recent Russian unemployed immigrants to work. These disparate projects were for the most part uncoordinated, unpublished, and in some cases, not located today. As a result, very little is understood about the nature of the Islamic city of Ramla and its relation to Islamic settlement and material culture in Israel in general. Only very recently has the IAA with the collaboration of the Council for British Research in the Levant begun to produce an integrative map and city plan of Ramla and renew major excavations. The next step for the progress of Islamic archaeology in Israel is to integrate excavations of other sites in a wider framework of Islamic excavations and make these accessible to the public who, in turn, can benefit from understanding their own contextualized place in the history of Israel and Palestine.

Peterson’s article provides a good examination into the role, history, and current state of Islamic archaeology. Furthermore, it shows how political ideology uses historical narratives for its own purposes and how these affect (and have affected) areas of academic study. He takes a positive stance toward the future of Islamic archaeology. I would temper this with further criticism regarding Israel’s role in the promotion of Islamic archaeology. Although there are a small but good number of Israeli archaeologists working on Islamic periods and research such as at Ramla shows an increased interest in Islamic archaeology the political ideologies of Israel continue to sublimate the understanding of Islamic archaeology, particularly in the areas of tourism – one of Israel’s biggest sources of revenue.

By way of another case study, I will briefly mention Islamic archaeology at the port site of Caesarea, the capital of Palestine in the Roman period and a larger city than classical Jerusalem. Excavators uncovered an important Early Islamic (8th – 10th century) domestic and industrial quarter consisting of a dense arrangement of houses, streets, shops, and sewerage systems in the filled-in ‘Inner Harbor’ of the port. Since the study of Islamic remains tend to focus on the monumental and religious, so little is known about Early Islamic daily life. Caesarea today is one of the most beautifully arranged tourist accessible archaeological sites. Its extensive structures are well labeled, restored, and outfitted with sitting areas and places to eat, all under National Park preservation and beautification program. The Inner Harbor, the locus of the Islamic occupation of Caesarea however, has been completely filled in and is now a perfectly green lawn; an empty space or, if you will, a proverbial wilderness.

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I hope everyone agrees with me, and believes that the deliberate destruction or neglect of a people's material heritage is a crime, a great crime against all humanity and posterity. It's what the US has done to Iraq, and to my mind removes all pretense that we are a "civilized society."