On 12 November 2025, the multiperiod archaeological site of Sebastia in the occupied West Bank, just outside Nablus, was subjected to an extensive Israeli expropriation order, 450ha in total, including not only the archaeological site but also 550 agricultural plots, mostly used for olive cultivation. They belonged to the Palestinian inhabitants of modern Sebastia and of the surrounding towns. The multilayer archaeological site, on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage sites, preserves traces of human presence at least since the Bronze Age; it has been associated with the Iron Age Shomron/Samaria capital of the Israelite Kingdom but it also includes substantial Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and Muslim material culture, in addition to the mosque dedicated to Prophet Yahiya (John the Baptist). While the acropolis itself is in area C (under Israeli military control), the surrounding area falls within area B (managed by the Palestinian Authority), and the site has been a major source of income for the Palestinians, who have been also engaging in community conservation projects. The Israeli non-governmental organisation Emek Shaveh, active on the politics of cultural heritage in Israel/Palestine, stated in a press release:

It is these acts of weaponising archaeology that are at the centre of this book. Sebastia is briefly mentioned (pp.108–109) and Israel and Palestine are covered in separate chapters. The book also deals with Greece and Cyprus. The author, Marie-Louise Winbladh, was a senior curator of Cypriot antiquities in Stockholm’s Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities for more than 30 years, has excavated in Greece and has maintained an active interest in the archaeology of Israel and Palestine. Colonialism and nationalism are the two, inevitably interlinked threads around which the book is woven, although there is no discussion on the epistemic underpinnings and the political foundations of these two phenomena. Equally, there is no explicit delineation for the chronology of this book, and it seems that the author has grounded the analysis in the present (or to be more precise, the author’s lifetime), with occasional historical digressions spanning the past two or three centuries. The sources and the raw material are drawn from secondary literature on these topics, primarily in archaeology and occasionally in other fields, and a disproportionate amount of news items. The news stories are not treated, however, as primary data in exploring how the contemporary mediascapes deal with the political role of archaeology but rather as authoritative sources. Source evaluation and criticism is in short supply in the book, and the reader will need to do their own homework for each source, to determine their standpoint, epistemic grounding and possible biases. Furthermore, no justification for the selection of these countries is offered, other than the author’s varied experience with them. Familiarity (through research and/or lived experience) is certainly a prerequisite for such an endeavour, but there is no attempt of a comparative analysis in this project. What makes these cases distinctive, and what are the throughlines that connect them or the sharp differences that separate them? Answers to such questions are not provided.

Given the complicated nature of the phenomena under study and the broad geo-political remit of the book, it would be unreasonable and unfair to expect an exhaustive and in-depth exploration in this book that is only about 300 pages. It does offer a descriptive account of the political entanglements of archaeology and ancient material culture. Occasionally, the author recounts personal anecdotes and stories, valuable vignettes from a long career, which certainly bring the narrative to life but they do not form part of a broader argument or a question-oriented exploration. This is perhaps a “one damn thing after another”-type of narrative, to evoke the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee’s dismissive turn of phrase. Combined with the lack of editorial care, reading is arduous. For example, in the chapter on Greece, after a brief but rather erratic overview of the foundation of the state, there are sections on the Olympic Games, on Macedonia, on the Amphipolis excavations, on heritage spectacles, museums, neo-Nazi appropriations, and the misuse of archaeogenetics, with no apparent connecting threads. The sub-title of the chapter (‘Land of white lies’) also betrays a fundamental theoretical weakness: this critique of the colonial-national narratives in archaeology seems to be grounded on an objectivist understanding, and on an impulse to debunk the ‘lies’ told. Nonetheless, these phenomena are much more complicated, and while the facticity of all narratives should be a subject of analysis and interrogation, exposing ‘the lies’ will not aid our understanding why these stories are told in a specific format, and why they gain importance and popularity, despite their lack of factual support. Besides, the social actors who are involved in these public performances believe firmly in the truthfulness of their stories.

The Cyprus chapter is for me the strongest and the one with the most personal anecdotes, understandably, given the author’s experience. An aim of this chapter appears to be to protest what the author believes to be the unfair treatment of archaeologists working in the northern part of the island (which the UN considers under occupation by Turkey since 1974), due to the nationalist stance of archaeologists from the Republic of Cyprus. Things are much more complicated, however, and anthropologists and archaeologists have described a story of competing nationalisms, under conditions of colonisation by several powers, more recently Britain, Greece and Turkey. The chapter on Palestine is particularly valuable, describing the various violations of international law by Israel, and it would have provided an interesting comparative case with Northern Cyprus, despite the significant differences. The author mentions that some Palestinian archaeologists are in two minds about whether to adopt the nationalist narrative that stresses millennia-old continuities (as happens with Israeli nationalism and some Israeli archaeology), thus avoiding the mirroring effect that we see in other contexts, such as Cyprus. This is a fascinating theme which, sadly, is not explored further in the book.

I want to finish on a positive note: we need more books on these themes, especially today, when nationalist and neofascist movements are again on the rise. Winbladh’s heart is in the right place, she is motivated by the desire to react to social injustices implicating past materialities, and has produced a book that contains valuable information. Yet, these are not easy topics to tackle, and cannot be explored without thorough theoretical and methodological work, as well as deep reflective thinking on our own positionality, even our own share of responsibility for the phenomena we set out to analyse.