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In a letter to the editor in this issue, the cultural critic Camille Paglia complains that sometimes archaeologists seem to think they own the past. Is there a “professional elite,” she wonders, that alone has the privilege of speaking publicly about “the history of humanity”?
Hershel Shanks, the editor of Archaeology Odyssey’s sister magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review (and Editor-at-Large of Archaeology Odyssey), is now under assault from the “professional elite.” In a recent edition of The Washington Post, the deputy director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Uzi Dahari, called Shanks “totally crazy” and “pathetic.” His crime? That he dared to publish an article in Biblical Archaeology Review on the James Ossuary (November/December 2002), a 2,000-year-old limestone bone box inscribed in Aramaic “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The article was written by one of the world’s leading experts in ancient Semitic script, André Lemaire of Paris’s Sorbonne University, and the bone box had been tested for authenticity by the leading laboratory in Israel. The real problem for the “professional elite” is that the bone box caught them by surprise—and it hurts to be sucker-punched by a “popular” magazine.
In June 2003 a panel of experts mustered by the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that the bone box was a genuine first-century A.D. ossuary but the inscription was a fake. The written statement released by the panel, however, was much more ambiguous: A number of the panel’s experts in ancient history and languages would not have declared the inscription a forgery if not for the evidence of the panel’s two geologists, who had performed new tests supposedly showing that the inscription was a modern addition. But that is not a complete account of what the geologists reported in their statements; they said the inscription, or at least the first part of the inscription (excluding part of the word “Jesus”), was either a modern forgery or affected by some kind of cleaning solution. According to the geologists themselves, then, none of the inscription could be proved to be a forgery beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Shanks’s audacity, it seems, has no limits. He now demands, perhaps somewhat loudly and stridently, that the bone box be tested again. Given the ambiguity of the panel’s report, however, you might think this a reasonable request. Again, the problem is not that it’s not reasonable but that it doesn’t come from the “professional elite.” Thus Shanks is “totally crazy” and “pathetic.” Is that how they talk to one another?
We at Archaeology Odyssey have also had our problems. Archaeologists at the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins University have refused to supply us with photographs to illustrate stories about their excavations. Why? Because we take a different position on how to stop looting. But the real point is that they think, with a distinctly unpleasant professional arrogance, that they own the past. It’s their dig, after all, and they can control who gets material and who doesn’t.
In the end, this may be just an ugly manifestation of a common occupational snobbery: Businessmen think they make the world go round; doctors imagine themselves angels of healing; and editors believe they are champions of the language. Archaeologists, or too many of them, consider themselves the owners of history. They ain’t.
In a letter to the editor in this issue, the cultural critic Camille Paglia complains that sometimes archaeologists seem to think they own the past. Is there a “professional elite,” she wonders, that alone has the privilege of speaking publicly about “the history of humanity”?