Tens of thousands of books have been written on the history of Jerusalem, and hundreds of archaeological reports highlight the fnds of the many archaeological excavations conducted during the last hundred and ffty years. Today Jerusalem is one of the most excavated and most disputed areas in the Levant. And nowhere else is archaeology interlaced so intimately with politics. This chapter focuses on the history of the archaeological excavations in the city and discusses the increasingly difcult relationship between archaeology and politics in Jerusalem.

Archaeological research in Jerusalem began more than 150 years ago as a clandestine operation, viewed with suspicion by local officials and by religious traditionalists of every stripe. Although it has had its moments in the sun, and though it has been pursued with unrivalled enthusiasm, making Jerusalem the most intensively excavated living city in the world (relative to its size), scientific archaeology has been forced to compete with, indulge, or retreat before the many other ways in which Jerusalem presents itself to the collective, religious and political imagination (Silberman 2001). This chapter is a critical review of the history of archaeological practice in Jerusalem. It begins with its initial steps as an expression of Western interest in, and reconnaissance of, the antiquities of the Ottoman Levant, when archaeologists staked their claim to the " birthright and sacred legacy of all civilized people " (James Henry Breasted, cited in Emberling 2010), and continues with the methodical recovery of ancient Jerusalem through three successive modernizing regimes – British-Mandatory, Jordanian and Israeli. This is followed by a discussion of the recent decades of archaeological and quasi-archaeological activity, motivated by national-religious ideology and adapted to the dominant neoliberal economic paradigm. One of the overarching themes of Jerusalem's archaeology has been its inability to keep pace with popular expectations: the final section will therefore be devoted to absences and gaps in the archaeological record, and to " the thing produced by suggestion, the object brought forth by hope " (Borges 1998: 78), and its role in producing fabrications, false leads and fabulous histories.

The study of the motivations, influences, and agendas of Israeli archaeology has always been the centre of heated debate, the profession today finding itself under the full, and usually highly critical, glare of modern archaeological theory and/or political polemics. This paper addresses the motivations of some these critics and from under the mesh of often over-stated argumentation, tries to provide a more level appreciation of current archaeological work in Jerusalem. Quite contrary to the impression given by some of the recent scholarship, it is argued that the great majority of the published and excavated archaeology of Jerusalem of the past decades presents the finds of the multiplicity of periods of the city’s history, quite divorced from overt and even covert influence of the surrounding volatile political situation.