Archaeological entanglements: Palestinian refugee archaeologists in Cyprus, Libya and Jordan

Abstract

In 1948 Stephan Hanna Stephan, a long-time employee of the Palestinian Archaeological Museum and respected historian and ethnographer, became a refugee, along with at least 700,000 other Palestinians. He and his family fled to Lebanon, but the passport of one of his sons from this period is filled with stamps indicating journeys to and from Cyprus. Stephan died of a heart attack in 1949, but an article by A.H.S. Megaw, head of the Department of Antiquities in Cypris, is a tantalising suggestion as to how Stephan’s career might have proceeded, taking a course plotted by his links through the various British-run archaeological institutions of the Eastern Mediterranean. If this had occurred, Stephan would not have been alone. At least two Palestinian refugee archaeologists from the Mandate government’s Department of Antiquities took up jobs in the British-run Department of Antiquities in Cyrenaica. Several others made the shorter transfer to the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, headed by Lankester Harding. As such, a scholarly Palestinian refugee diaspora was mapped onto British colonial and postcolonial involvement in archaeology across the Eastern Mediterranean. This paper locates Cyprus as part of that network via Stephan’s work, highlighting the ways in which middle-ranking archaeological professionals from British colonies participated in webs of knowledge production, and how their linguistic and cultural skills were utilised by British colonial institutions in contingent and shifting ways and circumstances. I argue that while British colonialism often exploited and sidelined indigenous archaeology and archaeologists across the region, the latter found ways to create opportunities within it. Archaeology under the British in Cyprus is thus entangled with other sites of British control and influence from Jordan to Libya, creating unexpected routes for survival in colonial and postcolonial settings