Shocking story from LRB, with some relevance here, about when archaeology gets mixed up in politics and religion and goes bad:
Neve Gordon in LRB (11/10/2011)
"In 2002 Israel Nature and Parks Authority hired Elad Wieselhe to run the City of David national park, in the densely populated Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan. Elad has spent millions of dollars trying (unsuccessfully) to demonstrate King David’s presence in that area.
By concentrating on unearthing the remains of the Judean kingdom, while ignoring the subsequent 3000 years, the archaeologists digging in these sites seem to have overlooked the World Archaeological Congress’s codes of ethics:
Members agree that they have obligations to indigenous peoples and that they shall abide by the following principles:
1. To acknowledge the importance of indigenous cultural heritage, including sites, places, objects, artefacts, human remains, to the survival of indigenous cultures.
2. To acknowledge the importance of protecting indigenous cultural heritage to the well-being of indigenous peoples.
According to Yoni Mizrahi, an archaeologist with the NGO Emek Shaveh, Elad is using archaeology more as a mechanism for concealing the past than as a tool for revealing it. Not a single Muslim structure has been preserved in the national park. Archaeology, Mizrahi says, is also a weapon of dispossession. Over the years almost all the green areas in Silwan have been transformed into well-guarded new archaeological sites. They are, in effect, Jewish outposts deployed to circumscribe Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem."
Yes this article is addressing the messy conflict between Palestinians and Israelis but who knows what evidence for religions and people predating the old testament stories of the Land Of Canaan have also been destroyed in the bias pursuit of giving evidence to fairy stories, what happens when one already "knows" what one will find. A religion in the business of obliterating the past. What a surprise.
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