In no other country is archeology as much of a national pastime as it is in Israel.

Archeology has been part of the collective psyche since before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In fact, the first excavations in what is now Israel began in the latter part of the 19th century. Needless to say, Jerusalem was among the first places to be excavated.

By the beginning of the 20th century, a number of prominent sites, including Jericho and Megiddo, had already succumbed to the spade of the archeologist. Along with many other intellectual pursuits, World War I put a temporary halt to archeological work in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire, especially when it allied itself with Germany during that bloody conflict.

But the period after World War I saw a flurry of archeological activity in the region. It has been called by many the golden age of archeology in the area of the so-called Fertile Crescent, which stretched in an arc from the Tigris and Euphrates  basin in what is now Iraq, through Syria and down along the Mediterranean coast from Lebanon, into Palestine and down into Egypt. This was the era of the League of Nations mandates, during which parts of the now-dismembered Ottoman Empire had been given to the victorious Allied powers of Britain and France. This ushered in a brief time when scholars and others could travel freely from one area to another.

Since Palestine was now a British mandate, the newly formed Department of Antiquities was run from London, although American scholars also played an important role in a number of major excavations. Probably the most influential of these was William Foxwell Albright, who would leave his mark on what came to be called Biblical archeology. Albright was instrumental in developing a number of key techniques that would define the discipline. Chief among them was the use of pottery chronology in dating archeological remains.

Anyone who has visited an archeological site knows that the surface is full of pottery shards. What Albright did was to arrange a sequence, associating various styles of pottery with archeological periods in the history of Israel. One dates the pottery by its shape, size and composition in the same way that someone can tell a 1955 Thunderbird from a Model T. This technique of pottery chronology would revolutionize archeology in Israel and elsewhere.

It was also during the inter-war years that a number of crucial sites were re-excavated. Chief among these was Jericho and Megiddo. The American excavations at Megiddo, run by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, were undertaken on a massive scale thanks to the financial support of John D. Rockefeller whose philanthropic generosity helped to fund the Oriental Institute. For this excavation, even  small-gauge rail tracks were built to haul away the enormous amount of dirt that was dug up. The aim of the dig was to uncover the entire mound layer by layer.

It would be the only time such an ambitious project was undertaken. By the middle of the 1930s, the Depression would force the project to scale back its aims. Even more unfortunate was the mess that such an undertaking had created on the mound of Megiddo. Even now, after a number of more recent excavations, Megiddo remains the centre of much controversy, since most scholars consider it the archeological key to unlocking the chronology of ancient Israel.

The era in between the two world wars would also see the start of what would become the foundations of Israeli archeology. Scholars such as Benjamin Mazar (formerly Maisler) of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which had been formed in 1925, would undertake the excavation of a number of crucial Jewish sites. Mazar himself would go on to become one of the founders of the renowned Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University and one of its presidents.