Project summary

The project aims to gather, preserve, study and publish forgotten documentation from Kathleen Kenyon’s expedition to Tell es-Sultan (1952-1958), which she directed on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (CBRL’s founding institute), University of London and the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Project details

Location: Palestine

Year(s): 2019

Project director(s): Bart Wagemakers

Lead institutions and funding:

• CBRL

Project description

The project aims to gather, preserve, study and publish forgotten documentation from Kathleen Kenyon’s expedition to Tell es-Sultan (1952-1958), which she directed on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (CBRL’s founding institute), University of London and the Palestine Exploration Fund.

This research is part of the wider Jericho off the Record project, which aims to trace, digitise, disseminate and study the ‘overlooked’ private documentation of the Second British Expedition to Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho. This expedition was significant for the development of archaeological methods and techniques, as well as for the knowledge of the habitation history of the Jericho Oasis.

The centennial grant funded a second phase of the project, which involved examining the ‘official’ excavation record as a base line against which to evaluate the potential contribution of unofficial records to our understanding of both the site and its excavations. The ability to compare the two categories of documentation offers insight into the development of the documentation methodology within the archaeological discipline.

The findings of this work were presented at a CBRL lecture in March 2019 and will be published in the volume Life Writing in the History of Archaeology: Critical Perspectives (UCL Press), edited by G. Moshenska and C. Lewis.

Project bibliography

Wagemakers, Bart. 2020. Jericho off the record. Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant 2018-2019, p 23.

Published:29 November 2021