Land, indigeneity and archaeological ruins in Ottoman Palestine: the people of Beit Jibrin and the Palestine Exploration Fund

Palestinian nationalism and visions of Palestine as a nation have, since the loss in 1948 of 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine to the newly-founded State of Israel, focused on notions of rootedness and connection to the land. However, as a result of the disruptions to Palestinian culture stemming from the refugee lives of a large proportion of the population, and the loss or fragmentation of many personal and institutional archives, sources for the quotidian details of rural life and how the relationship between land and people played out in different parts of historic Palestine are often scarce. This article experiments with the use of accounts by Western archaeologists as potential repositories of such information. This derives, I argue, not just from the descriptive features of such writings, which they share with other commonly-used sources such as travelogues and the memoirs of missionaries and other temporary residents, but also from the nature of archaeology itself as an activity which intimately, if at times controversially and destructively, engages with land and soil, and in which local people were often hired to carry out excavation on their own lands. While fully acknowledging the many issues raised by the use of imperial documents to consider the lives of indigenous and subaltern peoples, I seek to employ techniques such as reading against the grain to investigate how such archives can contribute granularity and detail to our understandings of rural life in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman period.