Should We Repatriate an On-Campus Archaeological Collection from the Middle East?

As the Director of the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology at Pacific School of Religion, I have purview over a legacy collection from an excavation in the Middle East, which has resided in Berkeley, California, since the 1920s-1930s. The vast majority of our collection, well over 98 percent, comes from a single excavation project led by W. F. Bade to Tell en-Nasbeh in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Badè received permits to excavate at Tell en-Nasbeh from the Department of Antiquities of the Mandate prior to each dig season, rented areas of the site from the land owners before digging, and included compensation for crops not planted (McCown 1947: 3). At the end of each of the five excavation seasons, a representative from the Department of Antiquities selected out objects for partage, following the law of the Mandate government (McCown 1947: 5–10) (Fig. 1). The remaining items were then crated and legally shipped out of the region to the port of Oakland and transported to Pacific School of Religion nearby in Berkeley (Fig. 2). At the time of the arrival of the objects in Berkeley, the wing of the Holbrook Building at Pacific School of Religion that housed the Palestine Institute and its museum space was not yet constructed. This building project followed in the early 1940s. In addition to several thousand objects, the Badè Museum also contains all of the original documentation from the project; including architectural drawings, notes, object records (Fig. 3), and photographs. This documentation has allowed contextual research on the collection and the excavation to continue into the twenty-first century.¹

From a legal standpoint, there is no call to repatriate the Tell en-Nasbeh collection. As I have detailed above, the objects were legally excavated and exported. Repatriation often involves ethical or moral sets of issues, which raises an interesting question for our collection. To which national entity would these materials be repatriated? The site’s geographic location on the southern outskirts of Ramallah is in the territory of the Palestinian Authority. The site’s ancient cultural associations, however, are with the Kingdom of Judah in its Iron II phase and the imperial province of Judah in its Babylonian-early Persian phase. Some would see this ancient cultural attribution as a link for the collection to the modern state of Israel. Others would argue for a more global approach; suggesting that the collection should remain in Berkeley, where it serves to help educate an audience of museum visitors who might not have the financial means, time, or the physical ability to travel to the Middle East to see comparable collections. As long as the collection is exhibited and stored responsibly, made available to the public and to scholars, and protected for future generations, I feel that it is best off here in California.

Fig 1.

Partage taking place at the end of Tell en-Nasbeh excavation season, with representative from the Department of Antiquities and J. C. Wampler (in pith helmet) and other project staff.

(Courtesy of the Badè Museum at Pacific School of Religion.)

With several thousand objects in our collection from the five primary strata at Tell en-Nasbeh, which date to the EB I, Iron I, Iron II, Babylonian-early Persian period, and Roman-Byzantine period, the Bade Museum is the largest collection of its type west of Chicago. Thus it fills a gap for a museum audience that desires exposure to the cultures of ancient Israel or Judah, arguably represented by the materials from the Iron II-early Persian periods at the site, with a collection that is unparalleled in the western United States. The objects in context tell a unique story of everyday life in a large Judean village, and also serve as an entrée for introducing the public at large to the fields of archaeology and material culture studies (Fig. 4). Besides our regular open hours, the Museum also provides programming and exhibit openings to add to our public outreach and the educational value of the...