Unnamed, uncaptioned: archaeological photography and colonialism at Jericho, as seen in the Kenyon Archive

Introduction

In a photograph among those in the Kenyon Archive, a man pauses while excavating to stare at the camera (Figure 1). He is barefoot, his clothes are ripped and he wears the traditional Arab keffiyeh head-dress. Unnamed, he stares at the camera with an expression that seems to challenge the gaze of the photographer. This is just one of many images that make up the Institute of Archaeology’s archive of photographs from Kathleen Kenyon’s 1952–8 excavations at Jericho, Palestine. In this article, the potential of this photographic archive for attesting to the colonial history and relationships at the core of archaeological practice is assessed along with how these histories feed into knowledge production through the Institute’s collections.

Figure 1

Workman on Kenyon’s excavation, name not yet known. Image 22 42 (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

The role of photography in archaeology and its archives

Photography in archaeology has traditionally been used to document the processes, contexts and finds of an excavation, with photographs as ‘documentary witnesses’ of archaeological method (Shanks 1992, 184; Shanks 1997). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeology and photography were emerging with the shared aim of representing history and they quickly became entangled in this mission (Baird 2017, 166; McFadyen and Hicks 2020, 3). In archaeological science, photographs became ‘instruments of objectivity’, and archaeologists recognised how photography could be used not just for recording archaeological excavations, but for creating archaeological ‘truth’ (Shanks 1997, 83). Photographs held in, and distributed between, collections facilitated the interpretation and comparison of vast quantities of archaeological material that would form the archaeological canon, becoming a form of archaeological artefact themselves (Klamm 2022; Shields 2015).

Archaeological photographs are also key instruments in record keeping and documentation within museum collections (Edwards 2023). They operate in a unique space that makes them ideal to think through the networks of ‘meanings, skills and practices’ that connect archaeological knowledge with museum practice (Edwards and Ravilious 2022, 4). These processes construct the form of the archaeological archive that in turn determines the form of archaeological knowledge (Baird and McFadyen 2014). Re-examining the archive, its content and formation, is therefore also re-examining how knowledge is constructed, allowing alternative histories to be told (Edwards and Morton 2015). This begins with considering the historical context in which archives are constructed.

The Kenyon Archive: historical and archaeological context

To understand the context of the Kenyon Archive, it is necessary to briefly outline how colonial interests are intertwined with the history of archaeology in Palestine. Major archaeological interest in this region began notably in the nineteenth century when Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. At this time, the growth of biblical archaeology in the United States and Europe led to the creation of organisations like the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in 1865, one of the first to systematically study Palestinian archaeology (Irving 2017). In 1917, the Balfour Declaration ended the Ottoman colonial period and instead committed Britain to establishing a ‘Jewish home in Palestine’ under British Mandate (Nassar 2024, 102). Two decades later, the Institute of Archaeology was founded and housed Palestinian material excavated by Flinders Petrie during this period: Kathleen Kenyon was hired as the first curator of this material (Sparks 2014, 73). In 1948, the British Mandate ended as Israel declared its independence as a state and violently displaced Palestinian people in what became known as the Nakba, meaning ‘catastrophe’ (Pappé 2024, 119). After this point, Israeli archaeology became more popular as excavations and surveys were used to create the ‘material-historical entity and fact’ of Israel in the early days of its statehood (Abu El-Haj 2002, 125). This clearly shows how archaeological excavations have been linked to colonial interests and presence in Palestine, whether British or Israeli.

Following the Nakba, British-led excavations continued, including Kathleen Kenyon’s work at Jericho in the West Bank, adjacent to the Palestinian refugee camp where she would source many of her excavators (Figures 2 and 3) (Kenyon 1957, 47–8). By this time, almost a century’s worth of excavations had established the presence of British archaeologists and their labour practices in the region. Rarely, if ever, were the local labourers they employed credited in post-excavation publications, even when they held leadership roles and had a high level of archaeological knowledge (Cline 2023). In recent years, scholarship has shifted towards uncovering the identities and acknowledging the agency of these ‘invisible excavators’, including those on PEF excavations in the early twentieth century (Cline 2023; Irving 2017). However, until now these accounts have overlooked both Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho as a subject for this research and similarly overlooked the unique potential of excavation photographic archives in this context.

Figure 2

View of Palestinian refugee camp captured from the Jericho tell. Image labelled ‘refugee village’ (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Figure 3

Unnamed workman poses behind equipment with the refugee village seen in the background. Image 1952.227 (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

The Kenyon Archive: formation and uses

As its teaching collection was founded using Palestinian material, the Institute of Archaeology had a firm focus on Near Eastern archaeology for a long period, resulting in more than 15,000 accessioned objects from this region in the collection today (Sparks 2014, 71). Supplementing this material are approximately 10,000 photographs, 2,652 of which come from Kenyon’s 1952–8 excavations at Jericho. According to Laidlaw (2020), most of these photographs were brought to the Institute as negatives and then made into prints in the 1980s. The photographs were recorded in the site notebooks, and this information was then written on the back of the prints and on the envelopes holding the negatives (Laidlaw 2020, 44). In the early 2000s, the negatives were moved to a new storage facility, and the collection was digitised. These digital images are catalogued with a range of identifiers, as seen in the images here. Some have a descriptive identifier (Figure 2), whereas others are numerical. Any image without an associated number was recorded as ‘Unmarked’ and allocated a number during digitisation. I argue that using these basic identifiers without any consistent, explicable system obscures the context of the photograph’s content and the history of the collection. Divorcing these photographs from their individual contexts further facilitates a view of them as solely supplementary records, in turn affecting how they are used.

While most of the images in the collection are of purely archaeological material, my focus here is on the images that capture the local Palestinian individuals working on or adjacent to the archaeological site at Jericho. Most recently, photographs like these have been used as part of retrospectives on Kenyon’s life and excavations at Jericho. For example, photographs of the non-white workmen on site have been used to supplement discussions of Kenyon’s relationship with her workmen (Davis 2008, 110). These have also supplemented discussions of the history of photography at Jericho and the formation of the Kenyon Archive (Laidlaw 2020). Additionally, similar images from private archives have been used in the same way in biographies of the other archaeologists on site (Wagemakers 2016). Here, the photographs act as supplementary evidence for the various stories being told, but as I will now show, their testimonies are not as innocent as they may seem.

Colonial relationships and archaeological photography at Jericho

The first images of interest here are those showing Jericho’s proximity to a Palestinian refugee camp (Figures 2 and 3). Here, there is a direct spatial link between archaeological practice and a settler colonial context. As in all the images that follow, the gaze of the Western archaeologist behind the camera ‘brings the oriental world into being’ through the powers of the photograph to create truth (Akar and Maloigne 2014, 137). In this way, the occupation of space by the archaeologists and refugees alike are preserved and legitimised even though neither are permanent inhabitants of the space. This is then further perpetuated in photographs featuring the residents of this camp who worked on the site.

Site photography has frequently documented archaeologists sourcing cheap manual labour in the communities local to their excavations (Akar and Maloigne 2014; Quirke 2010). In some cases, this reflected existing colonial relationships in the region, as can be argued is the case here, as Kenyon (1957, 47–8) describes employing Palestinians from the nearby refugee camp to work on her excavations. Britain’s close ties with the formation of the state of Israel meant that in the recent aftermath of the Nakba, British archaeologists like Kenyon remained tied to the authority of the British Mandate and, by employing Palestinian refugees, they were legitimising the authority of the British state over Palestinian people. While some may see this as bringing employment to those in need, excavation nearly always constructs a division between these ‘local’ workers and the Western archaeologists, erasing the former from all post-excavation documentation (Quirke 2010) except for these photographs.

The act of capturing local labour in this way legitimised the authority of the Western archaeologists in their ability to capture individuals at work, as in Figure 1 and 4 (Baird 2011). Here, the relationship between the photographer and the photographed is unequal, as one can record, while the other can only be recorded. This echoes the authority of the British over Palestinians during the Mandate and reflects how the Palestinian people were at the mercy of settler colonial powers. Once again, archaeology becomes linked to colonial presences through these images. When these photographs enter the site archive, these unequal power relations are encoded into the construction of knowledge of the site and thus archaeological knowledge more broadly, potentially impacting engagement with these communities in the present (Klamm 2022).

Figure 4

Workman on Kenyon’s excavation carries photographic equipment, name not yet known. Image KK 232 (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

A further category of images in photographic collections like this are images of local labourers on site but not visibly at work (Figures 5 and 6). In these photos, the evidence of archaeological practice is erased, and the individuals are captured almost as if they are inhabitants of the space. In this way, they become stand-ins for the ancient inhabitants of the site, disinheriting them from their own histories and identities in the same way as settler colonialism does. None of these images have captions or labels that identify any of the individuals present, further erasing their identities. The absence of Western archaeologists in these images specifically erases the colonial presence and power relations from archaeological practice, and hence the production of archaeological knowledge (Baird 2011).

Figure 5

Several workmen on Kenyon’s excavation pictured within the trench, their names not yet known. Image S2 R25A 27 (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Figure 6

Unnamed individual pictured within one of the excavated areas at Jericho. Image 1953.136 (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Leaving the excavation context, Figure 7 pictures a camp in the foreground and a group of individuals in keffiyeh, with the archaeological site of Jericho in the background. The question arises as to why this photograph, and others like Figure 8, are present in the excavation photo archive when they are not strictly archaeological in nature. This is not an uncommon practice, and by documenting local communities alongside archaeological sites, archaeologists are able to capture both the past and the present of the site, creating a sense of a ‘continuously inhabited landscape’ (Akar and Maloigne 2014, 141). However, the danger in this is that it can present the contemporary community as analogous to the ancient inhabitants of the site and disinherit them from their own history (Baird 2011). In the context of the Palestinian refugees at Jericho, the story that is erased in this process is one of settler colonial displacement and ethnic cleansing.

Figure 7

View of a camp with the archaeological site of Jericho in the background. Image labelled ‘Camp’ (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Figure 8

Three women in Palestinian dress, their names not yet known. Image labelled ‘Jericho women’ (Source: Kenyon Archive © UCL Institute of Archaeology)

As part of the Kenyon Archive, these photographs have played an active role in constructing knowledge on Jericho. Therefore, the unequal power relations, erasure of individual identities and denial of colonial history embedded in their content are encoded in that knowledge as a result. The inconsistent cataloguing and lack of contextual information associated with these images in the archive also serves to obscure these alternative histories. This facilitates a view of these photographs as part of supplementary documentation to a pre-existing narrative, as opposed to artefacts with their own stories to tell. The power of cameras and collections to create archaeological ‘truth’ is dangerous here as colonial narratives and practices are obscured and legitimised. It is worth noting, however, that these photos are also powerful in the presence they afford to these individuals who are otherwise denied elsewhere in the site archive. While the colonial gaze may dominate these images, I argue that it is possible to reorient our gaze to follow the subjects’ eyes instead of the photographer’s, looking with the sharp gaze of the individual as in Figure 1. In this way, collections of photographs like these can act as material memory and give us access to new histories of archaeological practice and the communities involved (Ward 2022). By reorienting the stories we tell using collections, it is possible to harness the powers of photographic collections to create new ways of seeing and new forms of archaeological truth (Shepherd 2003).

Conclusion

This cursory overview reveals the potential of the Kenyon Archive to be twofold. First, it acts as documentation of the ‘practice of archaeology as colonialism’ through representation of the colonial contexts of excavations like Jericho and the visualisation of labour practices and colonial power dynamics on site (Baird 2011, 435). The second aspect is to admit the unexpected through the images of archaeology’s hidden labourers, allowing us to rethink the ‘terms of engagement’ of archaeological practice (Shepherd 2003, 350). If ‘archaeology continually reproduces its own images’, then the challenge offered to us through these images is to decide which we will allow the discipline to continue to reproduce (Baird 2017, 165). Will we continue to leave these individuals unnamed and their stories untold? Or will we reorient ourselves to look with their eyes, back at the colonial, and imagine a new way of seeing?

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been published without the encouragement and advice of Professor Alice Stevenson. Many thanks to Ian Carroll, Lecturer (Teaching), for his invaluable assistance in accessing these photographs and to the Institute’s Head Librarian Katie Meheux for pointing me in the direction of resources that initially inspired this project. Finally, thank you to Professor Andrew Reynolds and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Declarations and conflicts of interest