With so much archaeological history there, any discussion of possible borders between Israel and Palestine would have to consider excavation sites. And now, for the first time, a searchable map of all archaeological activity since Israel took over the West Bank in 1967 has been created by the University of Southern California.
This Google map portal, which includes satellite images of about 7,000 sites including Jericho and Qumran (where the Dead Sea scrolls were found), won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from the American Schools of Oriental Research, a top organization for archaeological work in the Middle East.
The project began after Lynn Swartz Dodd, a lecturer in religion and curator of the Archaeology Research Center at USC, and Ran Boytner, director for international research at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, hosted a discussion with Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists in 2005.
“We talked a lot about how we could protect ancient sites and archaeological sites if an agreement was signed between Israel and Palestine,” Ms. Dodd says. “We wanted to make sure that when people sat down and tried to have an informed conversation about the area there was common data.”
The problem, Ms. Dodd says, was that much of the information about archaeological work from the past 40 years was not available to the public. So, Rafi Greenberg, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Adi Keinan, a doctoral student at University College London, pored over Hebrew publications and government records to document it.
Now, with their work as the basis for the Google portal, anyone can see exactly where any archaeological digs took place.
“This type of open access is where archaeology has to go in order to survive,” says Ms. Dodd. “The days of ivory-tower archaeology, where academics sit on all this data while only publishing tiny fractions of their work and leaving the rest to languish in inaccessible depots, is over. This is a step toward putting material out there to be used to answer big questions.”
