Thinkers and critics from Freud to Foucault have adopted archaeology as a metaphorical model, especially in relation to memory and identity. The origins of this metaphor can be found, according to one scholar, in a suspicious response to enlightenment empiricism: it turns out there are things we cannot see, touch, or measure, and these things, buried beneath the surface, turn out to be as consequential as the things we can see.[1] Julian Thomas uses the term “depth relations” to describe how the unseen powerfully shapes the visible world.[2] Indeed, Freud drew explicit comparisons between the work of the analyst and the explorer, who, “equipped with picks, shovels and spades” will “clear away the rubbish and … bring to light what is buried.”[3] The selective creativity of both archaeologist and analyst creates presence from absence: “Just as the archaeologist builds up the walls from the foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and position of the columns from depressions in the floor and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from remains found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories… .”[4] Archaeology thus shares a structural resemblance with memory, which may be activated by the recovery of some fragment.[5] Archaeology’s metaphorical power further extends to the creative process, which may be triggered by absence, as well as the finished cultural artifact.

Walter Benjamin also links archaeology with memory and narrative: “Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging …. Genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.”[6] Benjamin’s observations underscore how archaeology may serve as a model for exploring space and time — the material artifacts retrieved, as well as “an account — e.g., a narrative — of the strata.” (italics mine) For both Freud and Benjamin, archaeology provides a creative metaphor for understanding the self in relation to one’s past. In this essay’s exploration of archaeology as an aesthetic model, I extend this idea to consider how a society relies on a specific version of the past to navigate its present.[7]

Both Amos Gitai’s film, A House In Jerusalem,[8] and Rutu Modan’s book, Tunnels,[9] comment upon the contemporary conditions of archaeological practice in Israel.[10] Historically, Israeli archaeology and its institution have been instruments of the Zionist desire to establish a link between Jewish historical roots and the present, between a “biblical past”[11] and the modern state. This ambition is especially pronounced in what is known as Jerusalem’s “Historic Basin,” that broad swath of the city containing the physical institutions and material remains of three religious traditions. Excavation and salvage expeditions have been conducted in this part of the city for the better part of the last two centuries. As early as 1865, the prospectus of the Palestine Exploration Fund, founded in London, observed that “what is above ground will be accurately known [only] when the present … survey is completed; but below the surface hardly anything yet has been discovered ….”[12] Later, the Mandate period laid the foundations for modern archaeology as a science, creating protocols that were then adopted by the Israeli state and codified by the Israel Antiquities Authority. From 1996 to the present, according to archaeologist Katharina Galor, these practices shifted from “facts on the ground”[13] to “facts below the ground ….”[14] That is, knowledge of the land’s past became related to “aspirations to settle and own the land: to own — legally and intellectually — not only the visible and palpable ground but also, and perhaps even more importantly, the foundations and roots hidden below the ground, both metaphorically and physically.”(italics mine)[15]

The primary protocol for archaeological projects in and around Jerusalem deploys a method known as “salvage.” “Salvage” refers to a form of excavation deployed to understand the relationship between layers (akin to Benjamin’s strata): the relationship between different historical periods and the social habits implicit in the physical remains recovered. The standard protocol of a “salvage” operation would be to document everything you find, thus supporting a complex representation of how societies functioned and evolved. However, within Israeli archaeological practice, especially in Jerusalem, the focus has been on finding and preserving the Jewish bits and sometimes ignoring, even destroying, physical remains that would support the presence of other people with competing claims to the same space.

Left, image 1, Dr. Muhammed Dajani, House production photograph (Bait_P415-075.jpg), http://purl.stanford.edu/bh163nr4660, Amos Gitai film archive (M2266). Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries
Right, image 2, Amos Gitai, A House in Jerusalem production photograph, http://purl.stanford.edu/rd326sv5049. Amos Gitai film archive (M2266). Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

With these general ideas about the archaeological imagination and the reality of archaeological practice in Israel in mind, I turn first to Amos Gitai’s A House in Jerusalem (1998). This film is part two of a trilogy created over the course of twenty-five years, exploring the ownership and physical evolution of a house in Jerusalem’s German Colony. (The other films are House [1979] and News from Home/News from House [2005]). Throughout the nearly four hours total of film, Gitai documents the house and the surrounding neighborhood and interviews current and former inhabitants and owners, creating a rich, idiosyncratic history of a single space as it relates to nearly a century of change and conflict.

Owned and occupied until 1948 by the Dajanis, a prominent Christian Arab family, the house and others on Dor ve-dor shav street have since been home to a series of Jewish families, from Algerian, Romanian, and Iraqi immigrants during the state’s early years to the more recently arrived, and considerably more affluent, Anglo-Saxon and French Jews of the present. The house sits, therefore, directly in the middle of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its competing claims about history, territory, and political sovereignty. Part documentary-detective work, part poetic, often abstract meditation on landscape, the films present the house as a microcosm of the city’s fate over the past three-quarters of a century.

The trilogy’s first film, House (1979), consists of fifty minutes of black and white sixteen-­millimeter footage, featuring interviews with Palestinian laborers and Dr. Muhammed Dajani, who was born in the house (image 1). Fragments of this first film appear in the later films, a kind of cinematic self-reference that points to the slippery relation between documentary and fiction that has marked Gitai’s way as a filmmaker. Though the long arc of the trilogy is trained on the fate of a single house, the films also contain extensive scenes of digging and excavation in the Old City. One sequence in A House in Jerusalem explores the heaviness of Jerusalem stone and what it means to get caught beneath that weight.[16]

The camera follows the Israeli Jewish archaeologist deep into a tunnel beneath Jerusalem’s Old City (image 2). The recovery of artifacts connected to communal life ostensibly fortifies Jewish claims to the city and its history. He narrates for the camera (in Hebrew) details regarding the age of the walls and instructs Palestinian workers (in Arabic) where to move things. He seems oblivious to the dimly lit tunnel’s claustrophobic mood. Over and over, the archaeologist tells the cameraman/Gitai to look up to appreciate the tunnel’s full height. But the camera remains trained instead on the narrowness in front, the darkness, the stones one can reach out and touch — the inability to escape is palpable. The scene then cuts to a clip from the first film: a close-up of Palestinian stonemasons, working the stone forcefully and steadily, with enormous hammers, waiting for it to yield. These juxtapositions — color to black-and-white, documentary to something more formally abstract, present tense to an earlier scene from the same cinematic project — recur throughout the films. Here, in this sequence, they suggest the permanent and immovable quality of stone, and perhaps of the conflict as well.[17]

Beyond this scene of excavations in the Old City, the trilogy itself is also a kind of excavation, an archaeology of “dwellers” in the house. Gitai suggests as much as he travels to interview the son and the granddaughter of the house’s original owner, recording their memories. The constant poking at, and attempts to translate, the name of the street where the house is located — “dor dor ve-dorshav” [every generation has its own interpretation] — point to the problems latent in this generative point of view. While Jewish residents see it as exemplary of Jewish resilience and creativity, the Palestinians are afforded no such opportunity to adapt to new historical conditions. The film seems to view the Jewish rendering of this interpretation as a kind of cover story — what’s really happening is a land grab, short and simple.

Gitai also calls the house itself “a human archaeological site,”[18] suggesting a multilayered quality in which memory and space shape one another. In Gaston Bachelard’s terms, individuals carry some psychic imprint of their childhood home, a memory of that original space. But what about the house itself, after the people have left and new tenants arrive? Does it bear any trace of prior inhabitants? An “entangled view” would insist that the space somehow bears traces of its early human inhabitants. This is where the archaeologist comes in. It’s up to the archaeologist to “salvage” those traces, just as the filmmaker must retrieve and present them. The film is also a kind of self-archaeology, including fragments of the previous film. Indeed, Gitai himself views documentary filmmaking as akin to excavation: “You dig, you excavate, until you find a fragment of the story … to articulate the outline of what is hidden by the present.”[19]

Rutu Modan is the internationally acclaimed author of three graphic novels and has illustrated children’s books and other long-form comics narratives. Her most recent book, Tunnels, is set in the world of Israeli archaeology. Tunnels follows the fortunes of Nili and her son, nicknamed “the Doctor.” As a child herself, Nili had accompanied her archaeologist father, Yisrael Broshi, on various expeditions.[20] Their last father-daughter expedition was interrupted by the First Intifada in 1987, and most of the novel’s plot concerns Nili’s attempt to find the tunnel her father had begun to dig in search of the ever-elusive Ark of the Covenant. A cuneiform tablet contains clues as to its location.[21] Shades of Indiana Jones — and, indeed, there is a fair amount of intrigue and even suspense in this story. But no swashbuckling figure at the center. Instead, as in her other books, Modan’s female protagonist is a vibrant, flawed figure, who is manipulated and even lied to, but ultimately perseveres. Furthermore, the entire enterprise is shaky from the get-go, since her father suffers from dementia, and his memory is, at best, questionable. Modan’s work weaves together this domestic situation, involving a family secret, with the collective sphere, where a national source of shame is interrogated.

Modan’s longstanding devotion to comics as a vehicle for history and memory is front and center in Tunnels, as the book probes the relation between Israel and the Bible.[22] However, as in Gitai’s films, archaeology is more than merely a theme or motif. Archaeology also provides a compositional, experiential model for the author and her readers: the comics medium uses both text and image, a formal language that lends itself to the juxtaposition of time and space. The reader experiences the unfolding of narrative through the progression of panels on any given page, with the page itself acting as a kind of grid to be traversed and even broken. Thematic binaries as well as shifts in time are depicted and coded through variations in color, scale, and perspective, and with the addition of complementary textual cues.

These “archaeological moments,” the juxtaposition of time and space, are in fact a key feature in Modan’s earlier works. For example, in The Property, the unfolding of history is suggested through the unique language of the comics page, in space, as the memory of Warsaw’s prewar Jewish population intrudes upon the present tense adventures and tribulations of Modan’s diverse cast of characters. As we shall see, in Tunnels, as in The Property, comics provide an ideal language for presenting competing historical narratives. However, Modan seems to have even further pushed the methodological insights of her earlier work — the spatial dynamic in Tunnels is more pronounced, exposing the gap between what is visible above ground and what lies hidden beneath the surface. In one case, for example, the page deliberately plays with that separation of spheres by manipulating the size and positioning of panels on the grid, as well as by a distinct use of perspective (image 3).

Left, image 3, Rutu Modan, Tunnels (2021). Used with permission from the author.
Right, image 4, Rutu Modan, Tunnels (2021). Used with permission from the author.

It turns out that the site of Nili’s father’s dig — the tunnel they had abandoned in 1987 —  is adjacent to an enormous new landmark, the Separation Barrier. To get to the Ark, Nili will have to cross underneath the barrier, into Palestinian territory. The page featuring the Separation Barrier is a small masterpiece (image 4).[23] The craned necks and wide-eyed expressions of Nili and her sponsor anticipate the tremendous physical and psychological dimensions of the barrier. The wall itself takes up nearly a third of the page, dwarfing both humans and the natural world. The narrow white space in between panels is called, in comics terms, “the gutter,” and comics artists use it to indicate minute narrative shifts. The great British author Neil Gaiman once observed that the creative work of comics is done in the gutter — an ironic reference to the genre’s historically “low” or inferior status. Here, Modan depicts the Separation Barrier, slicing across the page, as the ultimate gutter, challenging her heroine and, implicitly, the reader to cross it. (italics mine)

After a series of reversals and strategic alliances, Nili gets to work, searching for her father’s tunnel with a zany crew of idiot zealots and her brother, also called Broshi, an aspiring archaeologist, toiling in their father’s shadow. In keeping with the book’s toggling between personal and national concerns, the tunnel provides an opportunity for rapprochement between Nili and Broshi. Their work is interrupted by mysterious noises, and when they break through to an adjacent chamber, they encounter a pair of Palestinian interlopers, digging from the other side of the Barrier, also apparently looking for the same tunnel. Of course, they know one another: Mahdi is the son of Hamoodi, who used to work with Nili’s father. It’s a political “meet cute,” which Modan makes the most of: their initial encounter is a wordless scene of underground confrontation, armed with shovels, pickaxes and gas masks. And their subsequent exchange over who really owns the tunnel mimics well-worn tropes about the conflict (image 5).

Left, image 5, Rutu Modan, Tunnels (2021). Used with permission from the author.
Right, image 6, Rutu Modan, Tunnels (2021). Used with permission from the author.

While the narrative continues to hold out the Ark as the ultimate prize, a funny thing or two happens on the way to the Ark. Certain “mysteries” or alternate histories emerge: the first is an underground homoerotic attraction between Mahdi and Broshi, which Modan traces delicately through a series of close-ups of facial expressions and the body, culminating in a kiss (image 6).[24] The second twist is that it turns out that Palestinian history, too, may be hidden below ground: Mahdi discovers that the tunnel was once used by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni (1907–1948), a prominent figure in Palestinian history and a leader of the prewar Arab revolt. Despite this historical intervention, in Tunnels the Palestinian characters feel a bit like extras, a contemporary rendering of what the critic Mordechai Shalev once called “the Arabs as a literary solution,” in relation to A. B. Yehoshua’s novella Facing the Forests (1963).[25]

All of these plot points involve the manipulation of text and image, an essential feature of long-form comics narratives, where readers are asked to perform a kind of “salvage” operation, sifting through the dense visual and textual cues, retrieving information that will help them understand the narrative flow. Within Modan’s work, this sense of reading as excavation, in which readers “dig” for relevant narrative cues, is complemented through the novel’s focus on objects — although the Ark is not just any old object, the entire novel is filled with the discovery, storage and exchange, even theft, of objects, some more and some less valuable. Of course, one person’s trash is another’s curatorial gold, and some objects in the novel have purely sentimental value.[26] Yet this “entanglement” between people and their stuff constitutes an important thematic and visual thread in Modan’s work.[27]

Image 7, Rutu Modan, Tunnels (2021). Used with permission from the author.

Even the humble iPhone is treated as a future valuable relic (image 7). Its ubiquity in the novel suggests how the human need for material culture, without which there would be no archaeology, persists in our own day, even for all its virtual and remote habits. The iPhone is also a kind of comic — text and image together on a screen. Toward the end of the novel, when the race for the Ark intensifies, a former rival of Nili’s father gives the Doctor a phone without his mother’s knowledge in order to track them as they search for the tunnel. Indeed, the Doctor’s phone is crucial in the end, as it illuminates the deep pit into which Nili and the Doctor fall. Without offering too many spoilers, there is a bit of drama toward the end of Tunnels as the Ark is found and then lost again.

Both Gitai’s film and Modan’s graphic novel deploy what might be called “the archaeological imagination.”[28] For documentary film, excavation becomes a kind of narrative mode: fragments of earlier works provide associative motifs, visual and auditory tethers along which the trilogy’s metanarrative about history and memory unfolds. For comics, the formal relation between panel, grid, and page provides a unique representation of time and space in which competing histories also suggest the tension between personal and collective memory, between family shame and national secrets. The reader herself must perform a kind of salvage operation to appreciate the complex narrative.

The link between archaeology and memory is more overt in Gitai’s film, which juxtaposes archaeological work in Jerusalem’s Historic Basin with a renovation project on a quiet residential street in the German Colony. The film suggests they are part and parcel of the same project: one above ground, one below. Modan’s book extends things laterally — from the tunnels in the Old City and East Jerusalem to the West Bank, tunneling beneath the separation barrier in a not-so-subtle image of coexistence, below ground if not above.

How to account for some of the differences between these two cultural engagements with memory and the past? Heritage scholar Neil Silberman has observed that “archaeological narratives cannot help but be constructed in contemporary idiom, with emphasis on each society’s specific hopes and fears.”[29] It’s possible that for Gitai, in the late nineties, memory still seemed a necessary force, even a potentially malleable ally, when provided with the right frame, the correct sequence. If you dug far enough back, you would get to the “true” owners, and memory, perhaps, would be restored, if not justice. Gitai’s film then seems to me to be part of that last great crisis in Israeli memory, centered around the work of the New Historians, when the archives opened and critics took Israel’s founding generation to task. Modan’s work, which is often hilariously funny, was written in a different time, maybe even post-post-Zionism, during an era characterized by what Modan calls in the afterword to the English edition of the book “a loss of agreement regarding reality.”[30] Without this shared sense of the world, what’s the use of unearthing ancient, or even more recent, evidence to support a reality that no one can agree on? In her book, the ferocious search for the past, be it the Ark or a more recent national reckoning, is potentially a kind of tunnel vision[31] in which memory is ultimately complicit and even destructive.

This allows for a final comment on Nili’s father and his dementia. His condition recalls other recent examples of aging and dementia in Israeli fiction, in particular the protagonist of A. B. Yehoshua’s 2018 novel, titled The Tunnel. Yehoshua’s Zvi Luria is a highly regarded road engineer, especially renowned for his tunnel work on Israel’s transnational highway. Aboveground tunnels within the Israeli road system are often created to skirt or detour around Palestinian villages, making it easier, and potentially safer, for Jewish residents of the territories to commute without having to see the homes of their Palestinian neighbors. As the book opens, Luria is diagnosed with a kind of degenerative atrophy in the brain, a condition causing some forgetfulness. Together, these two aging engineers of the Israeli landscape — Zvi Luria above ground and Nili’s father below — suggest that there is something fundamentally awry in the Israeli management of space. Dementia, of course, affects one’s memory, and it is not something to be idealized as anything other than the ravaging disease that it is.[32] However, both books seem to imply that a little less memory might actually be a good idea. 

endnotes

1. Julian Thomas, “Sigmund Freud’s Archaeological Metaphor and Archaeology’s Self-understanding,” in Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now, ed. Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009) 33–45. ↩

2. “Depth relations” may also be found in the deep structure of language, where meaning is produced and observed through social use. Thomas, “Sigmund Freud’s Archaeological Metaphor,” 44, following Frederic Jameson’s idea of “depth models.” ↩

3. Sigmund Freud, Aetiology of Hysteria (1896), quoted in Thomas, “Sigmund Freud’s Archaeological Metaphor,” 48–49. Some version of this model of the self is later modified by Michel Foucault, who suggests that entire societies rely on this kind of subconscious model to produce knowledge and power. See Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir [The archaeology of knowledge] (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1969) and later works. ↩

4. Sigmund Freud, “Konstruktionen in der Analyse” [Constructions in analysis], Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1937, quoted in Thomas, “Sigmund Freud’s Archaeological Metaphor,” 49. ↩

5. On this and memory’s creative force, see Anne Whitehead, Memory (London: Routledge, 2009), especially the chapter “Involuntary Memories.” ↩

6. Walter Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 576. ↩

7. See the evocative use of archaeological and spatial vocabulary in Avidov Lipsker’s Reflections on S. Y. Agnon (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press, 2015), especially 16–19, to describe the memory project in S. Y. Agnon’s late work, A City in Its Fullness (New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2016). For a related analysis, see the discussion of Agnon’s Just Yesterday in Barbara E. Mann, The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022) as well as my chapter there on yizker (memorial) books. Regarding archaeology as a metaphor for Jewish historical time, an unstated “ur-text” for Agnon’s meditations on the lost wholeness of Polish Jewry’s “Council of Four Lands” might be the extended description of an old lumberyard in H. N. Bialik’s short story Arieh Baal Guf [Big Harry] (1898). The text narrates a lengthy descent into a deep pit in which vast stores of ancient oaks and beams of all sizes and types are stacked; the wood represents a veritable “Pompeii,” which the protagonist Harry attempts to traverse and eventually use to rebuild his own family home, a metonymic rendering of Bialik’s own cultural recovery project in Sefer Ha-agadah [The book of legends] (1911). ↩

8. Amos Gitai, A House in Jerusalem, IMDb, 1998.  ↩

9. Rutu Modan, Tunnels [Minharot]; trans. by Ishai Mishory (Montréal, Québec: Drawn and Quarterly, 2021). ↩

10. Gitai’s film and Modan’s graphic novel are excellent sources precisely because they are visual artifacts, a status allowing for an exploration of archaeology as a critical model in spatial terms. For how archaeology might figure as a general theme in Israeli fiction, see my brief discussion below. ↩

11. Katharina Galor, Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology Between Science and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 3. ↩

12. Galor, Finding Jerusalem, 32. ↩

13. For a comprehensive, critical history of Israeli archaeology in relation to nationhood, see Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). ↩

14. Galor, Finding Jerusalem, 7. She continues in this quote: “All excavation efforts in the Historic Basin are directly or indirectly linked with Israel’s occupation policy.” ↩

15. Galor, Finding Jerusalem, 4–5. ↩

16. This archaeology sequence begins at 17 minutes. ↩

17. For a fuller discussion, see Barbara Mann, “House, Interrupted,” Michigan Quarterly Review 54, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 87–96. ↩

18. Quoted in Mann, “House, Interrupted,” 92. ↩

19. In voice-over from beginning of the third film. ↩

20. She was even briefly famous for discovering a seal related to the First Temple Period or Iron Age. On the 2019 discovery of Josiah’s Seal in Jerusalem, see Bari Weiss, “The Story Behind a 2,600-Year-Old Seal,” New York Times, March 30, 2019,
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/bible-josiah-david-seal.html. ↩

21. Modan, Tunnels, 17, 47. ↩

22. Nirit Anderman, “New Graphic Novel Digs Deep into the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Interview with Rutu Modan,” Ha-aretz, September 21, 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-turning-israeli-palestinian-conflict-into-comic-book-on-the-ark-of-the-covenant-1.9154052. ↩

23. Modan, Tunnels, 54–55. ↩

24. On the “tunnel vision” of various characters in the novel, see Hillary Brown, review of Tunnels, by Rutu Modan, The Comics Journal, February 1, 2022, https://www.tcj.com/reviews/tunnels/. ↩

25. The article originally appeared in the daily Ha-aretz, September 30, 1970, 50–51, and has been reprinted in Intersecting Perspectives: Essays on A. B. Yehoshua’s Ouevre, ed. Amir Banbaji, Nitza Ben-Dov, and Ziva Shamir (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuchad, 2010), 54–70. ↩

26. At play here is a sense of a hierarchy of objects and what Igor Kopytoff called their “biographies”: some are genuinely rare and have historical value, others have “merely” sentimental value. This subjectivity also extends to how certain objects legitimize the state and its biblical Jewish past, creating, even inventing, a continuity of ownership in a city where Jews were not the dominant religious population for long periods of time. See Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. ↩

27. Ian Hodder uses the term “entanglement” to describe “the dialectic of dependence and dependency between humans and things.” Ian Hodder, “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 20; and also in Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden: MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). ↩

28. For an account of archaeology as a theme in central literary works of Western culture, see Jennifer Wallace, Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004). ↩

29. Neil Asher Silberman, “Promised Lands and Chosen Peoples: The Politics and Poetics of Archaeological Narrative,” in Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, ed. Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 261. Silberman’s essay productively addresses the interdependence of archaeology and narrative, noting the presence of “archaeological narratives as both scientific hypotheses and literary texts” (251) and arguing that “for every new nation-state ready to construct for itself a modern saga, both scientific and literary conventions must be observed” (257). ↩

30. Modan, Tunnels, 277. ↩

31. Brown, review of Tunnels. ↩

32. A classic Israeli literary rendering of the dystopian possibilities of underground space may be found in Amos Kenan, The Road to Ein Harod [Ha-derekh le-eyn charod] (London: Saqi Books,1984). ↩