Palestinian Christians in the Mandate Department of Antiquities: History and Archaeology in a Colonial Space (original) (raw)

When British forces took Palestine from the Ottomans in 1917, the territory's antiquities were high on their list of priorities. Fuelled by a long-standing British Protestant interest in-not to say obsession with-the Holy Land, 1 measures to establish control over and soi-disant protection of ancient and historic sites were quickly rolled out. These were in some respects the logical conclusion of decades of European and American archaeological interventions in the region in which investigation of tells 2 and other sites was often paired (especially in the British and American expeditions) with the desire to "prove" Biblical narratives and identify existing Palestinian sites with places named in scripture. But Mandate antiquities policy was also a multi-layered strand of cultural diplomacy, asserting British stewardship of the Holy Land