A Chosen People in Foreign Lands: Historical Archaeological Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora

Since the inception of the field of historical archaeology, sites focusing on diasporic and marginalized populations have received interest from archaeologists. Despite voluminous publications, organizations and journals specifically dealing with various diaspora populations, Jews, a people and an experience from which the term originates, have been all but ignored in historical archaeology. The concept of diaspora has evolved in modern scholarship to encompass a variety of lived experiences through an understanding of diasporic theory as either forced exile or continuing exclusion. To this end, sites of Jewish antiquity have been interpreted through the classical model of diaspora, yet historical Jewish contexts have rarely been viewed through this adapted conception of the term. This session brings together a selection of scholarship that directly deals with the archaeology of the Jewish diaspora in the historic period from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.