Introduction
With over 230 museums, the State of Israel has the most museums per capita in the world. These range in size and sophistication from small house museums to those representing state-of-the-art contemporary museum design, such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum. Israel’s diverse assortment of museums covers time periods spanning prehistory to the present day. Not all museums are concerned with archaeology and many focus on other topics as varied as military history, grain, computers, sport, clandestine immigration, founding figures, visual art, folklore, and transport.
Definition
Museums that contain archaeological exhibits are of four main types. Small museums found in kibbutzimmainly focus on aspects of local history and can include geological, botanical, and zoological exhibits along with archaeological material. Regional museums such as the Hula Valley Regional Museum in the Upper Galilee can be more comprehensive, specializing in a particular subject such as...
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Further Reading
Abu El-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the ground: archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baram, U. 2007. Appropriating the past: heritage, tourism, and archaeology in Israel, in P. H. Kohl, M. Kozelsky & N. Ben-Yehuda (ed.) Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts: 299–326. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dayagi-Mendels, M. & S. Rozenberg. 2010. Chronicles of the land: archaeology in the Israel Museum Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Israel Museum.
Kletter, R. 2006. Just past? The making of Israeli archaeology. London: Equinox Publishing.
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Tully, C. (2014). Israel: Museums. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_767
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