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The idea behind such projects is to inspire a different kind of archaeology in Israel, Greenberg says. The British and other colonial powers used archaeology as a tool of imperialism, taking artifacts back home to fill their museums. Israeli archaeologists inherited this attitude, with the added ethos that their job was, first and foremost, to find evidence of the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land, he notes.
It is not a coincidence that Israeli law doesn’t recognize the archaeological value of anything that was made less than 300 years ago, says Dr. Ramez Eid, an anthropologist at the Open University and a partner in the Qadas project.