Land, indigeneity and archaeological ruins in Ottoman Palestine: the people of Beit Jibrin and the Palestine Exploration Fund

ABSTRACT

Palestinian nationalism and visions of Palestine as a nation have, since the loss in 1948 of 78% of Mandate Palestine to the newly founded State of Israel, focused on notions of rootedness and connection to the land. However, as a result of the disruptions to Palestinian culture stemming from the refugee lives of a large proportion of the population, and the loss or fragmentation of many personal and institutional archives, sources for the quotidian details of rural life and how the relationship between land and people played out in different parts of historic Palestine are often scarce. This article experiments with the use of accounts by Western archaeologists as potential repositories of such information. This derives, the author argues, not just from the descriptive features of such writings, which they share with other commonly used sources such as travelogues and the memoirs of missionaries and other temporary residents, but also from the nature of archaeology itself as an activity which intimately, if at times controversially and destructively, engages with land and soil, and in which local people were often hired to carry out excavation on their own lands. While fully acknowledging the many issues raised by the use of imperial documents to consider the lives of indigenous and subaltern peoples, I seek to employ techniques such as reading against the grain to investigate how such archives can contribute granularity and detail to our understandings of rural life in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman period.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• archaeology
• rural life
• gender
• Ottoman Empire
• indigeneity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See, for example, Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt and “The Palestinian Peasant” for an account of this in relation to the struggle for Palestinian national rights during the Mandate period, and Hamdi, Imagining Palestine, for more recent visions.

2. Tawfik Canaan’s daughter, for instance, wrote that ‘[m]other and father would go daily to the top of the Wall of Jerusalem to look at their home. They witnessed it being ransacked, together with the wonderful priceless library and manuscripts, which mother guarded jealously and with great pride’ (cited in Nashef, “Tawfik Canaan,” 24). Broader discussions of the acquisition of both personal and institutional archives by Israel in 1948 and after, and its impacts, can be found in Amit, “Salvage or Plunder?”; Azoulay, “Photographic Conditions”; and Mermelstein, “Overdue Books.”

3. Tamari, Mountain against the Sea, 93–111; and Furani and Rabinowitz, “Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine,” 478–9.

4. Limitations on the usefulness of Palestinian memoirs for the study of rural life pre-1948 include the fact that most are written by urban authors, although there are a few exceptions, including al-Barghuthi, Marahil; Sayigh, Yusif Sayigh, which describes periods of life in the Galilee; Irving, Nassif, and Sanchez, The House of the Priest, the memoirs of Greek Orthodox priest and nationalist activist Niqula Khoury, which include brief passages on the family’s life in the village of Bir Zeit; and Mapping My Return, in which Salman Abu Sitta gives significant descriptions of life on his family’s extensive landholdings in Naqab/Negev near Gaza and of agricultural and social practices. The travelogue-ethnography of Nu’man al-Qasatli (2011), a young draughtsman and surveyor from Damascus who played an important role in the PEF’s Survey of Western Palestine, and who went on to write a number of books in his own right, is also important. In addition, many memoirs written after 1948 have an understandable focus on narrating the injustices of British rule in Palestine and debunking Zionist political claims (as discussed in the Introduction to the Khoury memoir mentioned above). Oral histories have provided important information on rural life before 1948, but as projects recording subaltern memories mainly date from the 1970s onwards, so the information their information necessarily comes from more recent periods of Palestinian history. For discussions of the possibilities and constraints of oral history in the Palestinian context, especially on subjects of gender, see Yahya, “Oral History and Dual Marginalization”; and Morkus-Makhoul, “Decolonising the Social History.”

5. Irving, “Women versus Wheelbarrows.”

6. For the latter, see, e.g.: Tamari, “Archaeology, Historical Memory, and Peasant Resistance”; and Grehan, Twilight of the Saints.

7. Roque and Wagner, Engaging Colonial Knowledge.

8. Anderson, “An Alternative Discourse”; Hamilakis, Indigenous Archaeologies; Greenberg and Hamilakis, Archaeology, Nation and Race; and Tamur, Site-Worlds.

9. Including, for example, Mickel, Why Those Who Shovel; Quirke, Hidden Hands; Irving, “The Kidnapping of ‘Abdullah al-Masri”; Cradic and Pfister, “Unsilencing the Archives”; Tamari, “Archaeology, Historical Memory, and Peasant Resistance”; Çelik, About Antiquities; Reid, Contested Antiquities in Egypt; Reid, Whose Pharaohs?; Corbett, Competitive Archaeology in Jordan; and Colla, Conflicted Antiquities.

10. Khayyat, A Landscape of War; Ingold, “Temporality of the Landscape”; and Olwig, Meanings of Landscape.

11. E.g. Abd el-Gawad and Stevenson, “Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage”; Abd el-Gawad, Garnett, and Price, “Repositioning Egyptian Archaeology”; and Abd el-Gawad et al., “Your Mummies, Their Ancestors?”

12. Abd el-Gawad et al., “Your Mummies, Their Ancestors?”

13. Anderson, “An Alternative Discourse,” 450–1; and Abd el-Gawad, “Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage.”

14. Gerber, Remembering and Imagining, 31–6.

15. Sufian, Healing the Land; and Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile within Sovereignty.” Walter Lowdermilk’s Palestine: Land of Promise is a widely published exemplar of the argument that the land and water resources of Palestine had been squandered by its inhabitants over recent centuries, and that the country needed to be revived by the return of the Jewish people, combined with ‘modern’ agricultural and hydrological methods.

16. Gerber, Remembering and Imagining, 36.

17. Bauhn, “Osman Hamdi Bey,” 10–11.

18. Discussions of the impacts of these officials, which often varied according to their own interest in antiquities and to the relationship between them and the European archaeologists whose work they were observing, can be found throughout the published reports in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly Bulletin during the Ottoman period, authored by Frederick Jones Bliss, R.A.S. Macalister, Duncan Mackenzie and others whose role with the PEF lasted for shorter periods, including Peters and Thiersch, examples of which are cited throughout this article.

19. Bliss, “Reports from Mr F.J. Bliss,” 98.

20. Irving, “Tale of Two Yusifs,” 230–1.

21. Irving, “Women versus Wheelbarrows.”

22. Çelik, About Antiquities, 163, 173.

23. Ibid., 173.

24. See also Butler, “Jericho Syndromes,” 59.

25. Salem, “Introduction”; and Salem, “Archaeological Use.”

26. Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 53.

27. Pertinent examples might include: the 1855 sinking in the Tigris of boats containing huge amounts of major finds from Khorsabad, excavated by the French archaeologist Paul-Émile Botta; the military base built by the US army on the remains of Babylon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and the remains from Tell Halaf burnt and pulverized when the Berlin museum housing them was bombed by Allied forces.

28. Khalidi, All That Remains, 209–10; and Reilly, “Peasantry of Late Ottoman Palestine,” 83, 89, 92.

29. Gerber, Remembering and Imagining, 27; and Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 80–117.

30. Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 2–3, 5–6.

31. Frederick Jones Bliss was one of the sons of Daniel Bliss, the founder of the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut. Frederick had been born in Lebanon in 1857 and was raised in the expanding Protestant community there, which also meant that he spoke fluent Levantine Arabic. See Hallote, Bible, Map and Spade for a full account of his archaeological career and life story.

32. Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 3.

33. Ibid., 2–7, 29.

34. Ibid., 3–4.

35. Ibid., 5.

36. Ibid., 76.

37. Quirke, Hidden Hands, 120.

38. See e.g. Green and Henry, Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey’, 59, 61, 67, 154; Sparks, “Digging with Petrie,” 1–16; Letter from Duncan Mackenzie to John D. Crace, July 29, 1910, mentioning ‘Nubian foremen’ and ‘Egyptian boys’, Palestine Exploration Fund archives PEF/DA/Mack/483.

39. Peters and Thiersch, Painted Tombs, 2.

40. Ibid., xiii, xv.

41. Anderson, “An Alternative Discourse.”

42. Peters and Thiersch, Painted Tombs, xiii.

43. Ibid., 1.

44. Al-Houdalieh, “Palestinian Antiquities Looters.”

45. Winder, “Abu Jilda.”

46. Bliss and Macalister, Excavations in Palestine, 9–10.

47. Ibid., 2.

48. Ibid., 3.

49. Ibid., 97.

50. Silberman, Digging for God, 131.

51. Ibid., 5.

52. Peters and Thiersch, Painted Tombs, 22–3; and Masterman, “Beit Jibrin and Tell Sandahannah,” 176–7.

53. Palestinian nativist ethnographer Ali Qleibo has documented the ongoing importance of the caves of the Beit Jibrin area to the lives of the region’s inhabitants and refugees from it; see “Transhumance in Tarkumia”; “Canaanites, Christians,” 10, 13, 15, 16, 18.

54. New York Times, May 4, 1948, 20.

55. Grehan, Twilight of the Saints, 90.

56. ANERA, “Palestine Situation Report (12 January 2024).”

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Sarah Irving

Sarah Irving in a lecturer in international history and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent, and editor-in-chief of the CBRL journal Contemporary Levant. She holds a Ph.D. in Islamic & Middle Eastern studies from the University of Edinburgh and is the author/editor of a number of books and articles on Palestine and the wider Middle East.