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  • From the Editor
  • Sandra A. Scham

We began this journal with a commitment to publish a wide variety of articles on archaeology that would not be limited to any particular discipline or approach to interpreting the past. We envisioned that with an emphasis on visual representations as well as scholarly analysis, the journal would provide an ideal venue for archaeological site reports, descriptions of new approaches to archaeological analysis, timely theoretical discussions, and thoughtful book reviews by experts. We are happy to present, in this issue, examples of all four.

The first of these is a comprehensive and handsomely illustrated exploration of a site that has long intrigued scholars because of its implications for understanding the confluence of different cultures and religions in the Upper Galilee during the second to third centuries CE. Qazion’s monumental cultic complex was first discovered in the late nineteenth century and has been a focal point for debate ever since. Detailing the findings from recent research on the site by Hachlili and Killebrew, the article on the Qazion complex considers it within its broader historical, archaeological, and cultural contexts. As a microcosm of the cultural milieu in Palestine, Qazion represents both the melting pot and mosaic of this fascinating period with its simultaneous expressions of imperial-local, pagan-monotheist, and Jewish-gentile traditions. Harvey’s detailed analysis and interpretation of the site’s famous dedicatory inscription and a description of the use of a new methodology to digitally survey the site using photogrammetry and GIS by Quartermaine, Olson, and Howland complete the detailed description of this important site.

This issue also contains Silberman’s discussion of narratives and their uses and abuses in interpreting the past. The “tyranny of the narrative,” as described by this noted writer and heritage expert, is at the heart of current heritage interpretations and conflicts in the Middle East. The article takes a close look at how competing versions of nationhood and ethnicity are both intertwined and juxtaposed within successive hegemonic histories that characterize one group’s period of desolation as another’s “Golden Age.” This is a topic of global, as well as regional, importance as sectarianism and ethnocentrism everywhere are erupting and creating alarming juxtapositions of past and present as witnessed by recent events in Boston. It did not escape historians that the name Tamerlan, a fourteenth-century CE figure sometimes called the “Sword of Islam,” figured prominently in this tragedy. Brutal conqueror to some, culture hero to others, the reverence in some parts of the world for this leader is yet another example of how the veneration of certain narratives, in Silberman’s words, becomes “inherently conflictual, essentializing historical processes and rigidly separating an ‘us’ from a ‘them.’”

Zorn’s review of Faust’s book entitled Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Desolation fits in well with these themes of cultural and religious transitions, and of competing narratives. The reviewer takes on the questions raised by two schools of thought on post-conquest Judah—those who believe that it was devastated as proposed by the biblical record and those who argue that there was continuity in the rural sector. The book discussed in this review article uses archaeological [End Page iii] evidence to argue the case for discontinuity, but Zorn thoroughly discusses the alternative interpretations and the evidence behind them. The review is an informative critique of an important new work on a subject that is of great interest to scholars in the field.

We hope that you will find this issue timely, informative, and interesting.

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