randomly thinking about that huge mosaic floor that that family in Gaza unearthed in their backyard last year, no idea if they’re safe, no idea how their home or that incredible archeological discovery has fared, maybe the IDF excavated it and moved it to one of their shitty museums, no fucking clue
I tried to find the podcast where I first heard about archaeology in Israel, and in Jerusalem specifically. I thought it was NPR, but if it was I wasn’t able to find it again. The TLDR was that Israeli archaeologists look for anything that legitimizes Israel’s presence there, so they search specifically for Jewish evidence, and discard everything else. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups have lived in Jerusalem in peace for centuries, but evidence of that is being thrown away as irrelevant to the aim of these digs. One of the big technical criticisms of these archaeological digs is that it’s bad archaeology. When you’re trying to investigate the past, you dig deep and vertically, trying to avoid damaging the layers as much as you can. These archaeologists dig horizontally, destroying much of the evidence of other cultural groups’ existences in the process.
Anyway, I couldn’t find the podcast, but here’s a source that talks about the same thing a bit:
ALT