In Their Own Words

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Robert S. Merrillees is both an archaeologist and a diplomat. He received his early training as an archaeologist in his native Australia and his doctorate in Egyptology from University College London. As an Australian diplomat, he was posted in a number of countries, including Israel. Upon his retirement from the diplomatic service, he served as director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI). He now lives in Burgundy, France, and continues to have strong opinions—archaeological and otherwise.

Archaeology is a highly professional, mostly ethical, but unremunerative occupation. No one ever got rich working at a university or museum in archaeological departments. …

At the same time, the discipline has become very expensive to perform since not only is excavation a costly undertaking, but the follow-up, involving empirical and scientific analyses as well as publication, makes great demands on time, effort and particularly budgets. It is no wonder that so many digs in recent years have not yet been fully and finally published. …

I set out to be an archaeologist 60 years ago. … Why did I switch from the possibility of a full-time archaeological career to diplomacy? Force of circumstances and personal preference. … Archaeology seemed and has always been for me the perfect pastime, readily pursued and aided by the sympathetic colleagues we met and befriended in every part of the world where we served. …

The problem with unpublished excavations is, in my experience, particularly acute in Israel.^a With a few notable exceptions, archaeologists there have been and still are so busy digging, they barely give themselves time to catalog all their finds, let alone publish them definitively. In 2008–2009 I had the privilege of being half the annual professor at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. My chosen topic was the Cypriot Bronze Age pottery found in Jerusalem, of which there is a surprising amount. I have never had a more frustrating time in all my years of archaeological research. Not only could most of the material recovered by the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Dominus Flevit not be found, but the Israel Antiquities Authority had split up tomb groups and distributed the pots I wanted to see all over the country, as much for decorative as for academic purposes. Comparative material from other sites in Israel relevant to my project was equally hard to assemble. So much remains unpublished and inaccessible. I was, for instance, unable to use any of the data on the Cypriot pottery from nearly three decades of excavation by the Kaplans at Jaffa from 1955 to 1982, as not a single final report had ever appeared during their lifetimes, and the museum in Jaffa was closed. And nothing definitive, including my Cypriot pottery, has yet been published. (Diplomacy prevents me from naming and shaming equally delinquent archaeologists still living today.) As a result I was never able to finish my undertaking in Jerusalem. If I had my way, I would ban all non-rescue excavation in Israel until the backlog of unpublished fieldwork has been completely cleared up. But then I am content to be an armchair archaeologist.¹

Robert S. Merrillees is both an archaeologist and a diplomat. He received his early training as an archaeologist in his native Australia and his doctorate in Egyptology from University College London. As an Australian diplomat, he was posted in a number of countries, including Israel. Upon his retirement from the diplomatic service, he served as director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI). He now lives in Burgundy, France, and continues to have strong opinions—archaeological and otherwise. Archaeology is a highly professional, mostly ethical, but unremunerative occupation. No one ever got rich working at a university or museum […]