This brief paper offers a summary of a discussion held in Berlin in the fall of 2025 on archaeology, cultural heritage and international law in the Israel-Palestine context. We present three primary issues that were debated. The first involved the impact of adopting a specific definition of antisemitism and its role in fostering or restricting debate in archaeology and beyond. Second, the discussion revolved around archaeologists’ responsibilities in the context of the ongoing conflict in the region and the place of international law in guiding archaeological and cultural heritage work. Finally, the politicized role of heritage in identity building, especially in a situation of stark power imbalance, was debated.

Some five kilometers west of ancient Jerusalem lies a large Iron Age tumulus. At the base of this tumulus, rock-cut installations were uncovered, including winepresses, caves and cisterns. The winepresses were first executed during the Iron Age, resembling the type that prevailed in the region west of Jerusalem during that time. The pottery and small finds from the Iron Age/Persian period included mainly storage jars, with a relative abundance of stamped jar handles, alluding to the economical activity at the site. Following the site's abandonment at the end of the Persian period, a rural settlement was established during the Early Roman period; its inhabitants had engaged in industrial activity, reusing the ancient facilities. Later, sporadic activity at the site occurred during the Early Islamic period.

This preliminary report describes an archaeological intervention at the remains of the village of Qadas, a Shi'i community in pre-1948 Palestine adjacent to the Lebanese border, and gives an overview of the historical context, motivations, aims and principal results of our work. The village was depopulated in the 1948 war and razed to the ground in 1966, and the destruction, concealment and appropriation of the village resources by Israel were the primary focus of our work. An unexpected perspective was afforded by the considerable traces of the war itself at the site, present due to the village's occupation by Arab Liberation Army troops between June and October 1948. The recent war, which has led once again to the temporary depopulation of the entire region, underscores the violence that is immanent in the rubble of Qadas.

This article presents the first detailed examination of a charred wood assemblage from Early Bronze Age I-III Tel Bet Yerah (ca. 3700-2500 b.c.e.). The wood-anatomy identification of the charcoal remains aims to reconstruct the nearby natural and horticultural arboreal environment as well as the long-term human-environment relations at the site and beyond it. The assemblage provides evidence for substantial fruit-tree horticulture, mainly of olive and fig. In addition, there is evidence for exploitation of a well-developed Mediterranean woodland in the site's vicinity, as well as of a riparian habitat. The assemblage also includes taxa rarely encountered in the regional archaeobotanical record, such as pomegranate. The transition from village to urban settlement in the Early Bronze II (ca. 3100-2850 b.c.e.) shows changes in the charred wood assemblage that parallel economic, cultural, and environmental changes evidenced in the settlement layout and other findings. Evolving cultural-economic interactions between local and "Khirbet Kerak" populations during the first part of the Early Bronze III (ca. 2850-2700 b.c.e.) are also indicated. The study also offers a general land-use scheme for the site, based on the data that emerged from this research combined with the results of other relevant paleoenvironmental and archaeobotanical studies.

Archaeology has long been recognized for its 19th century origins in, and 20th century contributions to, imperial and settler colonialisms, as well as its complicity in modern nationalism. By implication, therefore, archaeology has been adopted as a vehicle of modernity and western supremacy and the archaeological gaze has typically been a White one. In pre-state Palestine and in 20th-century Israel, management and academic echelons in archaeology were staffed by European-trained professionals, most of them Jewish Ashkenazi men. While in academia this hegemony has successfully reproduced itself through socialization and by means of a rigid curriculum, ensuring that senior positions at all research universities in Israel are still largely held by members of the founding group, state institutions have become more diverse, especially in the lower echelons of service. We argue that continued dependence on the Anglo-European definitions of science and archaeological value, along with the neoliberal turn in universities, determine academic curricula and career paths. These cement the dominance of Ashkenazim in Israeli academia and track non-Ashkenazim to non-academic positions as excavators and regulators, where mobility can be achieved through loyalty to the state apparatus and to the economic logic of ‘development’. This mobility, however, has had little effect on the racialized and gendered distribution of cultural capital in the archaeological community.

I attempt to characterize the shared foundations of archaeology, in light of the significant fragmentation of the discipline, the expansion of its chronological reach from deep antiquity to the present and of its scale and resolution from micro to macro, and the urgent call for its decolonization. I briefly explore the intersections of archaeological practice with the archaeosphere, temporality, memory, and archive, and locate the inflection point of personal values in the interface between archaeological epistemology—how archaeologists see and interpret the world—and praxis—how they go about creating the archaeological record.

Tel Bet Yerah has provided us with an opportunity to advance the study of diasporic Kura-Araxes research in multiple ways. Reflecting on what we have learned in twenty years at the site, we summarize the evidence for an assemblage that goes far beyond Khirbet Kerak ceramics, and includes the organization of space, miniature art, stone and metal artifacts, food and fuel acquisition and consumption practices. We also reflect on our evolving understanding of migration and interaction with local cultures and on the role of intentionality in maintaining cultural and political distinction.

Archaeology, Nation, and Race is a must-read book for students of archaeology and adjacent fields. It demonstrates how archaeology and concepts of antiquity have shaped, and have been shaped by colonialism, race, and nationalism. Structured as a lucid and lively dialogue between two leading scholars, the volume compares modern Greece and modern Israel – two prototypical and influential cases – where archaeology sits at the very heart of the modern national imagination. Exchanging views on the foundational myths, moral economies, and racial prejudices in the field of archaeology and beyond, Hamilakis and Greenberg explore topics such as the colonial origins of national archaeologies, the crypto-colonization of the countries and their archaeologies, the role of archaeology as a process of purification, and the racialization and 'whitening' of Greece and Israel and their archaeological and material heritage. They conclude with a call for decolonization and the need to forge alliances with subjugated communities and new political movements.

Kura-Araxes animal management strategies in the core regions of the tradition and in areas of its 3rd millennium expansion have seen only sporadic study. Recently excavated contexts at Tel Bet Yerah were occupied in the first part of the Early Bronze Age III (c. 2850–2700 BCE) by people using Khirbet Kerak Ware and accompanying artifacts associated with a diasporic Kura-Araxes cultural tradition; they provide a rich zooarchaeological assemblage that may be contrasted with that of the local Levantine population, underscoring social and cultural distinctions maintained by the diasporic community. Focusing on the cattle assemblages in Kura-Araxes sites, their use for traction and transport is explored, as well as their role in maintaining cultural identity.

Not far from where you live, in the rural counties outside of town, or in a village just over the border, there are people for whom dates and events like the "Fall of the Berlin Wall," "9/11," the "Great Recession," or "January 6, 2021" hold no particular meaning, or meanings quite different from those they hold for you. This is worth keeping in mind when reading the litany of catastrophes that formed a "perfect storm" for the large political and economic hubs of the twelfth century BCE—a litany that is part of our shared upbringing in an archaeology that has always prioritized civilizational cores: their texts and dynastic chronologies; their art and technology.In writing my synthesis of the Levantine Bronze Age a few years ago (Greenberg 2019), I had to take a good, hard look at the archaeological evidence on its own merits, without giving too much weight to the famously self-serving texts written by the elites of Egypt, Canaan, and other parts of the ancient Near East, which have so often been used to construct a narrative of Canaan. I also tried to set aside the received technological nomenclature that could place a particular year, say 1201 BCE, in the cosmopolitan Bronze Age and year 1199 BCE in the provincial Iron Age. Looking at the evidence accumulated in some one hundred years of excavation, I found it told a story that diverged from the one we were taught: not so much in its facts as in its tone or theme. I will condense this story here under three headings.LBA society in Canaan was socially fragmented, headed by a weak network of local elites. The dissolution of the Middle Bronze Age social contract, which allowed large, fortified towns to flourish in concert with a productive village landscape, left a vacuum in Canaan, soon filled by Egyptian imperial ambitions and by power-grabbing individuals or families. For three hundred years Canaan was characterized by great disparities in wealth, a persistently low rural population with limited productive capacity, an inability to mount collective construction ventures, and a political system that was shored up by constant threats and displays of violence. Elites kept and displayed their power—much as they do today—by virtue of a network through which they exchanged precious materials, crafted objects, and marriage partners.Egypt ruled by proxy. Apart from a thin stratum of Egyptian and Egyptianizing administrators and their representatives, Egypt maintained its interests in Canaan through manipulation of local power brokers and by threats—occasionally fulfilled—of targeted violence. Even when direct Egyptian intervention increased in the latter part of the period, many sites in Canaan were virtually untouched by the purported Egyptian occupation—a striking example is Tel Rehov, described recently by Mazar and Davidovich (2019) as subordinate to Egyptian rule, yet lacking any material manifestations of it. Even sites with an unquestioned Egyptian presence, like Bet Shean, display Egyptian-Canaanite cohabitation and cultural hybridization that sometimes outlasted Egypt's administrative control, showing that "walking like an Egyptian" does not always imply political subjugation..Internationalism did not trickle down. Imported objects feature prominently in archaeological reports, but their actual number and economic impact has been greatly overstated: Canaan's maritime commerce was restricted to small-scale retail trade in coastal craft (cabotage) and, beyond a few coastal sites, neither Cypriot nor Aegean pots or their contents appeared to play an important role in local palatial or urban economies. The exchange of low-bulk, high-prestige craft items, cosmetics, ivories, and metals was the lubricant of the one percent at the top of the social ladder but hardly trickled down below it.When, as Cline describes in detail in 1177 BC (Cline 2021), the established LBA order unraveled over the long decades between 1230 and 1130 BCE (not in a single year!), new actors began to emerge on the stage. These actors are characterized archaeologically by cultural and material continuity with the Late Bronze Age, and I therefore suggest that they be viewed as an emergent, previously suppressed expression of Canaanite culture and political creativity (sensu Graeber and Wengrow 2021). They include the rural settlers of the late thirteenth- to eleventh-century highland villages (often characterized as [proto-]Israelites), the lowland town and village sites characterized by Canaanite continuity, and the flourishing hybrid Canaanite-Mediterranean urban-village assemblage of the southern coastal lowlands that later became known as "Philistine." Whatever the challenges might have been in a post-imperial—and perhaps climatically drier—Levantine world, all three sectors flourished during the twelfth and eleventh centuries, as has been demonstrated in numerous excavations. And this would not have been the first time that Levantine settlement patterns were out of sync with purported climate change and neighboring political and societal changes: similar things occurred throughout the third millennium BCE and at the start of the second millennium, when the flowering of Middle Bronze I culture and settlement was likely correlated with diminished rainfall. I also offered an explanation for this phenomenon: "the ecological mosaic of which the Levant is composed ensures that for every niche lost, for example, to minor climate change, a new niche will be won" (Greenberg 2019: 7); subsistence security could be maintained through social and territorial flexibility.1A recent collation of radiometric, demographic, and climatic data from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia (Palmisano et al. 2021) seems to corroborate my approach. Citing extensive and up-to-the-minute sources, the authors write decisively that "population reached a peak in the Iron Age during a period of increasingly arid climatic conditions" and that from about 5500 BP (that is, the beginning of the Bronze Age), there is a "decoupling of climate and human population. The climatic and demographic trends, despite regional variations, are either negatively correlated or not correlated at all" (emphasis added). In other words, when the climate changed, people coped.But what of the evidence for famine, war, migration, and political collapse? There seems little doubt that these things occurred, but they are not serial calamities, descending on the hapless eastern Mediterranean like the tribulations of Job. Rather, they are all symptoms of one thing: when a corrupt, hollowed-out empire or international order begins to lose its grip, war and its apocalyptic companions, famine and pestilence, appear on the scene. These battles and food shortages occurred at specific places and times and cannot be placed on the same temporal scale as climatic change, which is, at the very best, measured in multi-decadal units that cannot be accurately correlated with individual events (see also Knapp 2021). Thus, rather than suffering the same catastrophes as its neighbors, the Levant might have been a haven for some of their victims.I suppose that if I were asked to sum this all up in a catchy title, it would have to be, "1230–1130 BCE, the century during which a few large imperial polities succumbed to their structural weaknesses and corruption, allowing repressed societal assemblages, especially in the periphery, to reorganize themselves and flourish." A bit dull, I admit, but it does correspond to the archaeological evidence we have in hand.

The role and significance of fish and fishing in the ancient Near East has been little studied. A new assemblage of fish remains and fishing gear recovered from Bronze Age Bet Yerah on the Sea of Galilee, however, offers insights into the transition from village to town life, and illuminates interactions between local populations and incoming groups. The assemblage also reveals temporal and spatial variations in the utilisation of local fish resources. As the first such assemblage obtained from a systematically sampled Early Bronze Age stratigraphic sequence in the Southern Levant, it highlights the contribution of secondary food-production and -consumption activities to the interpretation of socio-cultural change.

Neither a polity, nor a culture, nor an ethnicity in any strict sense, Kura-Araxes has been described as a 'society against the state', with an aversion to structures of economic and social centralization. What happens when such a society is thrown into an apparently dependent relationship with a settled urban population? This question is explored through the lens of Tel Bet Yerah/Khirbet el-Kerak, in the Jordan river valley, where a small diasporic Kura-Araxes community settled in abandoned spaces within a 25-hectare walled town, maintaining its corporate identity over a span of two or three generations.

ABSTRACT:The contents of a small trash pit discovered in the recent excavations in Hellenistic Philoteria (Tel Bet Yeraḥ/Khirbet el-Kerak) offer a unique opportunity to study the components of what appears to have been a single festive meal. Extant remains include numerous mammal bones, mollusc shells, and ceramic tableware; they suggest a rustic Mediterranean cuisine, compatible with the presence of Greek settlers in pre-Hasmonean Galilee.