Archaeologists Challenge Barnard Professor’s Claims(Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)
Marissa Brostoff | Wed. Oct 17, 2007
Amid charges of mud-slinging, a group of archaeologists turned to dirt-digging — literally — in their fight against a controversial fellow academic.
On Monday night, Columbia University’s pro-Israel student group played host to the latest installment in a lecture series aimed, at least partially, at rebutting Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose work has been critical of the traditional narratives of Israeli archeology.
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On Monday night, the featured speaker was William Dever, a retired professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Arizona who is a critic of Abu El-Haj. Although he never referred explicitly to Abu El-Haj in his lecture, Dever challenged notions advanced by some academics about archaeology’s inherent biases.
“Archaeology has never been edited,” he said. “When we dig these things up, they are pristine.”
Judith Jacobson, a member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, made the opening remarks at Dever’s lecture. She said that the lecture series, titled “Underground: What Archaeology Tells Us about Ancient Israel,” was conceived partly to remind the community that good Israel archaeology exists in abundance. Asked if she thought the series served a political purpose, Jacobson answered carefully.
“Only to inform the community,” she said. “It’s all we can do.”
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UPDATE (20 October): Ralph Harrington at the Greycat blog offers a trenchant criticism of the quotation attributed to Dever.
UPDATE (27 October): More here