The Ethnocracy of the Palestinian Urban Space and the Indigenous Approach: Praxis and Theory

This article is a case study of the Palestinian recent past that produces a new knowledge on the maltreatment given to the archaeological remains of the Palestinians in the Late Ottoman period (18th to 20th centuries) by the dominant culture in Israel. The inequitable representation of the Palestinian-Ottoman heritage by the state creates both submission and resistance to the prevailing culture by the Palestinian citizens. The new knowledge created by this case study may be further used in order to understand the diverse experience of marginality of various contemporary dispossessed and displaced groups.     

The Future of WAC: A Fringe or a Popular Professional-Social Network?

In response to Shepherd and Haber??s (Public Archaeology 10(2):96?C115, 2011) article ??What is up With WAC??? I argue that, on the one hand, it is possible to adopt the authors?? new definition of Indigenous with certain modifications that enable it to accept a diverse constellation of responses to dwelling-in-displacement and explain the origin of these inequalities. On the other hand, I argue that WAC is not a reactionary organization of colonial heritage but that it makes great efforts to respond to 21st century postcolonial archaeology.     

Differentiated treatment of deviancy at death as revealed in anthropological and archeological material

Social deviancy has been observed among all groups by sociologists. To distinguish normal from deviant social personae in archeological material, a set of hypotheses has been formed and tested in ethnological examples of burial customs relating to social deviants. These hypotheses refer to the variety of the definitions of deviancy among different social groups, and to the dependence of the definition upon the type of evaluation elicited from the collective opinion of the group and upon the level of the social complexity of the group. Although there are a number of difficulties in testing these hypotheses in archeology, nevertheless there exist several archeological cases that would seem to confirm one of the hypotheses proposed in this paper.     

An Ethnography of Teaching Archaeology

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it refers to the ethics and logos of my courses in archaeology of the Near East and Israel attended by both Jewish and Arab students whose spatialisation of history and memory is different. The courses cover two periods: a—from prehistory to about 1,000 B.C; b—Christian and Muslim eras. Although these courses put much emphasis on Israel, the major sites of the Near East are well represented. Second, this article delineates some problems in the epistemology of Israeli archaeology, especially the slender consideration given to recent postmodern attitudes. Third, this article maps out an alternative way of teaching archaeology in contested regions such as Israel where different communities have their own mappings of the past. This alternative way provides the students with tools to evaluate the creation of knowledge about the past, and to reflect on their own social and relative positions in Israeli society. Dedicated to my teacher and friend, the late Prof. Moshe Kochavi