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Interviewing on my day off

This past Thursday I went to the dig anyway to interview the two head archaeologists for the first paper we are writing. The prompt (for the paper) is to choose a site in Jerusalem and talk about either is sacredness religiously or politically. Because I am working at the dig I thought that The City of David would be an obvious and interesting choice.

I went into the interviews thinking that both head archaeologists would have some sort of opinion about the controversies surrounding the dig. However, while I am sure that they had opinions, Doron (who I interviewed first), asked me not to ask any questions about the politics of the dig at all. When I asked him to explain why he wouldn’t talk about the politics he simply responded that he was an archaeologist not a politician. He came to the dig because, in his opinion, digging in Jerusalem is the dream of every archaeologist and it was an offer he couldn’t and wouldn’t turn down. As far as the the single narrative being promoted by the City of David (he said it was a shame: this was my interpretation of our discussion, upon speaking with Doron again he does not feel this way) and hopefully not something that would also be applied to the Givati parking lot because one of he other reasons he was attracted to the site was the number of cultures you could find there. He described the site as inclusive rather than exclusive, which I liked quite a bit.

After speaking with Doron and seeing how little the politics surrounding the dig affected him and the work he was doing at the dig, I focused a little more with Yana (the other head archaeologist) with where she saw herself within the politics and the conflict and whether she saw herself contributing to one side or the other by digging.

She saw herself in a similar light that Doron did, as an archaeologist not as someone who is making a political statement by working at Givati. She also made a point of separating the Givati parking lot from the City of David across the street. She explained how her speciality was actually the classical periods (not the time of David), and all the the time periods they dig are treated equally in terms of preservation and analysis. They have two publications of their finding from each period. Because not everything can be saved they choose the best “representatives” of what they found to preserve and just about everything they find they publish in the books. They are currently working on the third. She also separates the parking lot in terms of name. She never refers to the parking lot as The City of David, only as Givati. Also, the area they are digging in is lower Jerusalem.

One of the things I was also eager to talk to her was the way the archaeology is politicized in terms of how much where the digging stops is looked at as political, and how removing the top layers is also politicized. He response was that the people who become outraged at the idea that layers are being removed simply don’t know anything about archaeology. Archaeology is a destructive science in that in order to keep learning you have to remove what is on top. You can’t expose the lower layer without removing the top layer.

It was nice to hear from the archaeologists themselves and hear what they think of their work and the politics surrounding it. I find that the people we spoke to about the City of David spoke on behalf of the archaeologists, or maybe they thought they were speaking for them. However, after the interview I found that few if any of the ideas overlapped.

~Sarah

June 23rd, 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

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