“We are trying to be honest about our colonial roots and colonial past, and how our work was used within colonial agendas whether that was our intention or not,” she says. Since it was occupied by Israel in 1967, at least one hundred hectares of the town’s land have been confiscated to build Jewish settlements and Israeli military bases.įor Cobbing, the question of restitution is part of a larger debate around decolonisation. Al-Ram lies northeast of Jerusalem, and is now a town surrounded on three sides by the separation wall built by Israel.
“Now the biggest hardship in al-Ram is the wall and the continuous theft of land,” says Abu Hammad. Those in power might have changed, but he says deprivation is ongoing. Abu Hammad, who works as an accountant at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), believes the mask was taken under duress.įor the resident of al-Ram, the appropriation of antiquities in the late 19th century is only an episode in the long history of systematic dispossession of Palestinians by colonial powers. “It has to be returned,” says Tawfiq Abu Hammad, who lives in al-Ram. Not everyone, however, is convinced of the legitimacy and fairness of the purchase. The controversial Israeli separation barrier between the Palestinian West Bank village of al-Ram (foreground, R) and the Israeli settlement of Neve Yaacov in East Jerusalem (L) (AFP) Since Thomas Chaplin was an associate of the PEF who often provided the organisation with assistance, it is likely the mask was donated to the fund after his death.Įstablished in 1865 under the royal patronage of Queen Victoria, the PEF’s collection in London includes thousands of artefacts taken from Palestine between the 1860s and the 1930s. “It’s a fascinating object, we believe it comes from the ritual material culture of the Neolithic period, about nine to 10,000 years ago,” says Felicity Cobbing, PEF’s chief executive. Today the mask is believed to be one of the oldest known in the world, and it is part of the Palestine Exploration Fund’s (PEF) archaeological collection, a British society based in London. jVYkpV8KTh- Palestine Exploration Fund November 21, 2020 It's thought these masks (only 16 in total) from the Judean highlands & West Bank were used in rituals, but as most are unprovenanced, this is speculation.
The ‘Er-Ram Mask', (PEF-AO-4803) is an unfinished stone mask, prob Neolithic (c.9,000 bce). The villagers’ attempts to hold on to the mask, however, were not successful. “It seemed, however, that the object was regarded in the village as a sort of talisman which it would not be well to part with, so a number of men ran after me with their guns and demanded it back,” he continued in an article published in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement nine years after the incident. “A woman brought me a very curious stone mask, which I immediately purchased for a small sum,” wrote Chaplin, who was then the director of the evangelical London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews’ hospital in Jerusalem.
At least, this is how the story was reported by Thomas Chaplin, the British man who took the mask. Armed with guns, a group of men confronted him and refused to let him take the village’s ancient stone mask. When a British missionary rode through al-Ram in 1881 asking for antiquities, residents of the Palestinian village tried to stop him from taking the local treasures.
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