Archaeology, Nation, and Race Quotes

“Archaeology gave them something to latch onto, something material and physical: Places to be in and landscapes populated with buildings, agricultural installations, water conduits and much more, in which to evoke this glorious past.”
― Raphael Greenberg, Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel

“Each of Israel’s wars of expansion was accompanied, sometimes within days, by archaeological reconnaissance, as were its settlement projects in the West Bank.50 Here too, it is an ongoing project.”
― Raphael Greenberg, Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel

“In fact, most of the outstanding monuments and ruins were emphatically not Jewish – Crusader fortresses, Ottoman city walls, churches, monasteries and large tells that testified to a history that began before Joshua’s conquest and ended well after the Jewish dispersal.”
― Raphael Greenberg, Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel

“In fact, there was an ambivalent attitude to archaeology in the leading labor-Zionist wing of the Zionist movement, which was much more interested in the future than in a past that weighed down on the national movement. Yes, there was a vision of recovering ancient grandeur, connecting the modern and ancient national movements by evoking the ancient Hasmonaean state or conjuring up the times of the great rebellions against the Romans.”
― Raphael Greenberg, Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel

“Neo-classicism, not just in architecture and urban planning but also in remaking archaeological sites and shaping culture in general, became the colonial technology which was transplanted from Munich, Berlin, and Paris,36 a technology that merged monumentalization with capitalist modernization.”
― Raphael Greenberg, Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel

“Munich, of course, was already the center of German neo-classicism, and important archaeologists and architects who were instrumental in the neo-classical shaping of that city and the movement of Greek Revival became Otto’s entourage, and started shaping the archaeological structures of the new country.33”
― Raphael Greenberg, Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel