Sharing the Spoils: The Historical use of Loans and Gifts as Collecting Methodologies for Building Biblical Archaeology Teaching Collections

Abstract

During the first half of the 20th century, the division of finds laws of the British Mandate of Palestine and Transjordan facilitated the legal formation of large Biblical Archaeology collections throughout the United States. For Biblical Archaeologists without excavations or surveys of their own however, creating such a collection was far more difficult with the only existing formal mechanism being the often prohibitively expensive antiquities market. Primarily using the example of the Oberlin Near East Study Collection, Oberlin College’s historical Biblical archaeology collection, I argue that in this period, scholars could rely on artifact loans and gifts from their academic colleagues in order to build large teaching collections quickly and cheaply. These dispersals strengthened the social and academic ties of Biblical Archaeologists while also mitigating institutional storage problems. Whereas the export of antiquities out of Palestine was heavily regulated, once artifacts were in the United States, their legal owners could move them as they wished, accompanied by little or no documentation. As a result, while such collections formed through loans and gifts were likely common, they remain an under-documented phenomenon.

Keywords

• biblical archaeology
• object habits
• archaeological teaching collections
• nelson glueck