Over the last two decades, western academia has begun to explore and come to terms with its part in the recent colonial past and its lingering effects in the present. Scholars investigating the regions of Southwest Asia and North Africa are no exception, but this is still a relatively new and uncomfortable field and topic for this part of the world, and there are still relatively few studies that explicitly wrestle with it.

In recognition of this deficiency, and in an effort to begin to ameliorate it, the Badè Museum, the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Archaeological Research Facility (UC Berkeley) came together in 2021 to sponsor a virtual exhibit at the Badè Museum (“Unsilencing the Archives: The Laborers of the Tell en-Nas?beh Excavations (1926-1935)”), created and curated by Dr. Melissa Cradic and Sam Pfister, along with a yearlong series of YouTube lectures on this topic (hosted at the Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley's YouTube channel).

This volume, emerging from the lecture series, is devoted to exploring the agency of many unnamed or underappreciated agents of archaeology within this colonial past. It serves as a kind of festschrift in honour of the often poorly documented, yet important, role(s) played by Middle Easterners during the period of the British Mandate.

The chapters in this book focus geographically on Palestine and the wider Middle East during the British Mandate period (roughly 1918–1948), with particular attention to sites, institutions, and individuals connected to archaeological work in Mandatory Palestine and neighbouring regions such as Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. Methodologically and thematically, the contributions emphasize “unsilencing” archival records by foregrounding marginalized actors—especially local laborers, Palestinian scholars and regional intermediaries—while exploring themes such as knowledge networks, colonial power structures, archival practices, and the socio-economic dimensions of archaeology, including labour, naming, and antiquities circulation.