Contributions to the Archaeology of Palestine by Overlooked Twentieth-Century Palestinian Archaeologists, Yusra Al-Ḥaifawiyah, Naṣr Dwekat and Ibrahim Al-Fanni

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the family of Ibrahim Al-Fanni and in particular his daughter, Fatimah Al-Fanni, who did not hesitate to supply valuable information on her father’s life. In addition, I wish to abundantly thank the family of Naṣr Dwekat and in particular his son, Ahmad, for providing photographs and information on his late father’s life. Unfortunately, I was unable to contact the family of Yusra, who had emigrated or passed away due to the 1948 war and Al-Nakba. God rest her soul. I also wish to express my thanks to the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) for providing financial assistance for this project.

Arabic Glossary

Abu: word commonly used in Arabic names, meaning ‘father of’ (e.g. Abu I’ssa, Abu Kefaḥ).

Al-Ḥaifawiyah/Al-Karmeliyah: alternate last names used for Yusra whose actual last name is not known; Al-Ḥaifawiyah relates to the city of Haifa in the north of Palestine (now Israel) and Al-Karmeliyah to Mount Karmel in Haifa Subdistrict.

Al-Nakba: (meaning disaster or catastrophe) refers to the 1948 Palestinian exodus when over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. This was approximately half of pre-war Palestine's Arab population.

El-wad: Arabic word meaning valley which refers to the cave in the valley of Mount Carmel.

Ijzim: a former village in the Haifa Subdistrict of British Mandate Palestine, located 19.5 km south of the city of Haifa that was depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Large numbers of Palestinian inhabitants became refugees in Jenin after a group of Israeli special forces, composed of members of the Golani, Carmeli and Alexandroni brigades, attacked villages in Operation Shoter on 24 July 1948.

Jaba (also Gaba or Geb‘a): a former Palestinian Arab village in the Haifa Subdistrict. It was depopulated on July 24 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War as part of Operation Shoter. It was located 18.5 km south of Haifa, near Mount Carmel, and 3.25 km east of the Mediterranean Sea.

Karmel: a coastal mountain range in northern Israel stretching from the Mediterranean Sea towards the southeast.

Khirbet: (or Khirbat) meaning ‘ruin’ is used in the names of numerous archaeological sites.

Ṣabbarin: former Palestinian Arab village, 28 km south of Haifa. It was depopulated during British Mandate Palestine (1947–1948).

Ṭabun: (or ṭaboon): cone-shaped clay oven with flat top and opening at the base for stoking a fire. Used in the past as a communal village or extended family oven; it continues in use today in parts of the Middle East. Nowadays they are also made of metal.

Tell: derivation of Arabic word tall for mound or small hill, first seen in English in an 1840 report of the Royal Geographical Society. Variants include tall, tel, til, and tal.

Notes

1 Yusra’s surname is not known. The name الكرملية (Al-Karmeliyah) was used for her by Hamdan Taha (2018) in his article in Al-Ayyam, in reference to her origins in the Mount Carmel area near Haifa. Taha also notes that it is unclear which village she came from. There is no mention of Yusra’s surname or place of origin in Dorothy Garrod’s notebooks or diaries from 1928-1935, nor in her personal archive held at the Musée d'Archéologie Nationale en Saint Germain-en-Laye, Paris.

2 The interviews were conducted under the terms of the Institutional Review Board's policy at An-Najah National University of respect for the privacy of study subjects and their families and an agreement that any information given to a researcher would be used solely for purposes of scientific research.

3 Mary Kitson Clark was a distinguished figure in prehistoric archaeology due to her work with two British scholars, Mary and Louis Leakey, who established prehistoric archaeology in East Africa. She later changed her research specialty from prehistory to Roman antiquities (Garrod 2013: 220-22; Weinstein-Evron, Kaufman, Yeshurun 2013: 88-106; Byrd 2011: 186-88). She died at the age of 100 in 2005.

4 Dr Pamela Jane Smith specialises in the history of British and Canadian twentieth-century archaeology; working primarily as an oral historian, she investigates the creation, production and 'travel' of academic knowledge. After coming to Cambridge from Canada in 1994, she became the first to document the lives of numerous British prehistorians such as Grahame Kitson Clark, Dorothy Garrod and Miles Burkitt; her research was based on previously unknown sources which she herself found; this original, new research has been subsequently widely used by academic authors. She has a wide knowledge of the history of archaeology and is often used as an academic adviser (biography available at: https://tinyurl.com/9ruwa9vs)

5 Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996) was a highly respected archaeologist, a writer of poems, plays and articles, a film-maker and broadcaster and peace campaigner. Her best-known work is probably A Land (1951), which fuses archaeology, literature, geology and art to explore Britain's past and present. She first married fellow archaeologist Christopher Hawkes; her second husband was J.B. Priestley, the novelist and playwright. (biography available at: https://tinyurl.com/2udt9cy9)

6 https://tinyurl.com/c9m8ptta

7 https://tinyurl.com/c9m8ptta

8 Further information on Dorothy Garrod can be found in numerous studies, including those by Bar-Yosef & Callander (2004), Callander and Smith (2007: 76-8), Rosen (1991: 308-321), Seligman (2011), Sigalas (2021), Smith (2000: 131–6; 2004: 265–70); Price (2009) and Keinan (2013: 97-103).

9 Oral record from interview with Naṣr Dwekat’s son.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Loay Abu Alsaud

Dr. Loay Abu Alsaud Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Tourism and Archaeology. Abu Alsaud has 12 years of experience in higher education, including lecturing, curricula development, and education project management. He has supervised archaeological excavations in archaeological sites in Nablus area such as in: Tell Sufan, Khirbet Al Sheikh Hemeed, Monastery of Bir Al-Hamam, and in the Old City of Nablus. Abu Alsaud published many articles on the archaeology of the Roman and Byzantine period in the Nablus area in English, Spanish, and Arabic languages in regional and international journals. Dr. Abu Alsaud has designed tourism and hotel management curricula with a focus on building entrepreneurial skills.