Archaeological films as primary sources for Palestinian history
Almost by definition, refugees tend to only enter the historical record as victims, after they have been displaced, dispossessed, or subjected to conflict or some other disaster. This contributes to a popular perception of refugees as an anonymous, relatively homogenous mass of hapless individuals. Yet what about if we could glimpse into refugees’ lives before their displacement; would this alter the way we perceive them and perhaps even transform public attitudes towards them?
A range of archaeological archival films from the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-1948), like those from the 1930s excavations at Tell ed-Duweir (1932-1938), allow exactly that. They offer a very different insight into Palestinian lives in the decades prior to the 1948 Nakba, in which more than 750,000 were displaced and became refugees. Seeing local children, women and men standing and sitting outside their homes or tilling their fields puts them in the light of a much more mundane, everyday and peaceful existence and certainly does not cast them as victims. And yet we watch the footage in the knowledge that virtually everyone featuring in these films who was not white and British and who was still alive in 1948, would have been displaced at that point.
In Palestine, as in other former Ottoman dominions in North Africa and the Middle East, the British takeover resulted in numerous British- and American-funded archaeological expeditions during the first half of the twentieth century. ‘When the British Mandate began in the early 1920s,’ Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis have argued (2022: 25), ‘archaeology was the central plank of making Palestine modern and giving science a prominent role in its administration.’ Like so much work under colonial rule, archaeological excavations relied primarily on the largely-unacknowledged labour of local people. At programmes like the Wellcome-Marston archaeological expedition to unearth the Biblical site of Lachish at Tell ed-Duweir, there is a particularly tragic irony to this approach, as the archaeological evidence which local Palestinian labourers helped excavate would later be weaponised by the Israeli state into a tool for justifying their expulsion. While this may not have been the (European and North American) expedition leaders’ primary intention, there can be little doubt that western-funded archaeological expeditions in the Middle East directly contributed to the subsequent expulsion of Palestinian people from their land. However, at the same time, these excavation programmes also helped document, partially incidentally and partially on purpose, the presence and lives of local Palestinian communities in the places from which they have since been expunged.
In addition to the standard 1930s practice of taking many photographs on site, the British expedition team at Tell ed-Duweir included not one but two filmmakers, who documented the excavations on film. One of these was the architect Ralph Richmond Brown (1904-1975), who was specifically employed to film progress at the excavations, while the other was Gerald Lankester Harding (1903-79), a leading archaeological member of the team who happened to be an enthusiastic amateur filmmaker. This resulted in several hours of film footage, which covers each of the six excavation seasons at Tell ed-Duweir and is now archived at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. While the obvious focus of these films are the archaeological discoveries and progress of the excavations, the perhaps most impactful and memorable aspects are the scenes documenting the hundreds of local Palestinian women, men and children hard at work.
We would like to invite readers to watch the short five-minute video accompanying this blog:
The tell (Lachish) itself has seen several further archaeological excavation projects since the 1930s, through a range of subsequent research campaigns following the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948; in the 1960s (Aharoni expedition 1966-68), between the 1970s and 1990s (Ussishkin 1973-94) and in the 2000s (Garfinkel 2013-2017; Höflmayer and Streit since 2017). The site (located roughly halfway between Hebron and Ashkelon) has also recently received a new interpretive centre and information panels and thus functions as a minor visitor attraction an hour southwest of Jerusalem. What visitors to the tell invariably miss and similarly, viewers of the film footage might also overlook, is the fact that there had been a Palestinian village – called al-Qubayba (el-Qubeibeh) – on the hill opposite the tell, where many of the Palestinian labourers for the expedition had come from. The village was destroyed during Operation Yoav in October 1948, when the Israeli military sought to drive a ‘wedge’ through the Egyptian forces around Gaza and the road that linked Beersheba to Hebron and Jerusalem. Unfortunately for the villagers of al-Qubayba, this put them directly in the firing line and little upstanding traces remain of their village.
On careful viewing of the excavation films, it becomes apparent that the footage doesn’t only show the inhabitants of Qubayba working on the Lachish excavations, but there are also a few short sequences captured in the village itself. It is likely that the brief sequences from Qubayba link to an ethnographic interest in local customs. This is highlighted through the films screened to British audiences in the 1930s, where the local population was presented as still living in conditions akin to those of ‘Biblical times’.
Still of Qubayba from Lachish City of Judah
Regardless of the motivation for its original recording, this footage bears direct testimony not only to the presence of local people on site, but also to their place of residency, some 10-15 years before they were all expelled from there and their homes destroyed. This mirrors the fate that befell over 400 other Palestinian villages which have been all but erased from the landscape. As historian Nur Masalha has put it, ‘while an observant traveller can still see some evidence of these villages, in the main all that remains is a scattering of stones and rubble’ (Masalha 2001, 50).
Contemporary Qubayba
How does this material aid refugee history?
Although the sequences from the excavation films that directly record Qubayba last barely more than one minute in total, they nonetheless provide clear evidence of a thriving village with a significant number of inhabitants and serve to enliven the records of destroyed villages, which frequently focus on statistics such as number of people, number of dwellings and size of the area. They also lend support to the oral testimonies subsequently given by several of the refugees from there, such as that of Hussein Abu ‘Awwad on Palestine Remembered. They put Qubayba (back) on the map of Palestine-Israel where there currently is an ‘empty space’ and help to counteract the active attempts to erase both the traces and memory of the village’s existence.
United Nations records show that 1,350 people were registered as having come from al-Qubayba, and that the vast majority of them eventually ended up in Fawwar camp on the outskirts of Hebron. Therefore, most inhabitants from Qubayba, and many of their descendants, live to this day only some 25 kilometres away from their former homes. At this point it is also important to acknowledge the lockdown conditions and regular assaults by the Israeli Defence Forces which the residents of Fawwar have been experiencing since 7 October 2023.
Refocusing the archaeological lens
The role of film during the colonial period has seen a considerable amount of research attention in recent years. This includes archaeological films from the first half of the twentieth century. Alongside the footage from the Wellcome-Marston expedition, there are films made at excavation projects at Tell en-Nesbeh (1926-1935), Mount Carmel (1931-1934) and Tell Megiddo (1925-1939). However, these films have to date almost exclusively been approached from the perspective of the study of the history of archaeology and contextualising it within its colonial origins. This invariably includes a focus on a small number of white, western archaeologists. Conversely, the potential of these films in the context of refugee history but also Palestinian heritage has not yet been fully realised. They provide the possibility for the construction of ‘potential histories’ and a distinctly ‘civil imagination’ (Azoulay 2011, 2019) of the past, present and future of the lives of the people from al-Qubayba and other Palestinian villages that experienced similar fates.
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The header image is a still from Lachish – City of Judah, Wellcome – Marston archaeological expedition. Filmed in Qubayba. Courtesy of UCL Institute of Archaeology
References and Suggested Reading
Azoulay, A. 2011. From Palestine to Israel: A photographic record of destruction and state formation, 1947-1950. London, Pluto Press.
Azoulay, A. 2019. Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism. London, Verso
Greenberg, R. and Hamilakis, Y. 2022. Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the past, decolonizing the future in Greece and Israel.
Green, J. and Henry, R. 2021. Olga Tufnell’s Perfect Journey: Letters and photographs of an archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean. London, ULC Press.
Masalha, N. 2001. The historical roots of the Palestinian refugee question. In N. Aruri (ed.) Palestinian Refugees: the right to return, pp.36-67. London: Pluto Press.
Ussishkin, D. 2014. Biblical Lachish: A Tale of Construction, Destruction, Excavation and Restoration, Jerusalem: Biblical Archaeology Society.
