First Person: Archaeology as Peep Show - The BAS Library
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First Person: Archaeology as Peep Show

Promptly releasing images of archaeological finds would benefit scholars, scholarship and the public. Try it.

By Hershel Shanks

I’ve been fighting it for years: archaeology as peep show. As in, “Wanna see a dirty picture?” I thought it might be a thing of the past in this Internet age, but it’s as alive as ever: “Come to the Annual Meeting and we’ll show it to you. Yessiree. Step right up and have a look. Go back home and tell your friends and colleagues, you’ve seen it, the whole thing.” I’m not talking about pornographic pictures, but recently excavated inscriptions of some importance. If you go to the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) […]

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Footnotes

1.

Hershel Shanks, “Failure to Publish Dead Sea Scrolls Is Leitmotif of New York University Scroll Conference,” BAR 11:05.

2.

See Bezalel Porten, “Did the Ark Stop at Elephantine?” BAR 21:03.

3.

See “Leading Scholar Denied Access to Elephantine Ostraca,” BAR 21:03.

4.

See “Without Avigad’s Pictures—Is the Jerusalem Cardo Roman After All?” BAR 03:04.

5.

Nahman Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983).