Excavating Zion: Archaeology and Nation-making in Palestine/Israel

This paper demonstrates that archaeological discourse and practice in Palestine/Israel is intertwined with a nation-making project of settler colonialism that contains both spatial and temporal dimensions. This project primarily serves to invent a link between the ancient Israelite past and the modern Israeli state, presenting colonization as “return” to “the homeland” through familiar narratives of frontier settlement. This article proposes that Israeli archaeological practices not only help to reproduce these narratives, but also participate in the inscription of the national territory as Jewish, and the consequent dispossession of the Palestinian