ABSTRACT
Archaeologists may perhaps be forgiven for thinking that they know all about ruins. Competent to describe, date and interpret them as buildings, classify them as monuments and construct object biographies that reflect their modification and changing use, we typically invest ruins with value as historical relics of their own time. It may be that we do more; in her anthropological study of the excavation of Jerusalem in the twentieth century from which the title of this chapter is taken, Nadia Abu El Haj has argued that archaeologists do not simply discover ruins; they also invent them, through a process of both uncovering and recognition (2001). The ruin becomes a ‘fact on the ground’ – visible testimony to the truth of the historical narrative to which it is linked. In this way, the footings of a city wall can ‘prove’ that urban space was both defined and defended; a collapsed portal demonstrates the formality and salience of a temple.
