Book Description:
According to a patriotic legend still current in Israel, in 73 C.E. 960 heroic Jewish rebels committed mass suicide at the fortress of Masada rather than surrender to the overwhelming force of their Roman oppressors. This version of what happened at Masada seemed to receive solid scientific validation when Professor Yigael Yadin excavated the ancient wilderness stronghold from 1963 to 1965. But do the facts uncovered at Masada by archaeologists actually support the legend? According to sociologist Nachman Ben Yehuda, Masada provides a case study of how the search for scientific truth can be influenced by the pressures of a cultural agenda. In this fascinating analysis of history in the making, Ben Yehuda closely examines the day by day transcripts of the archaeologists' conversations at Masada to determine the way in which they evaluated the findings. He skillfully demonstrates that the interpretation of artifacts uncovered during the dig was significantly affected by the process of nation building and the forging of a national identity, which was then under way in Israel. Nation building required a heroic past, and the pressure of this requirement subtly led to concealing facts and even falsifying the historical evidence. Why did the archaeologists involved, all scientifically trained scholars, ignore scientific evidence in favor of a version of history that now appears to be largely a myth? The answer is the focus of this intriguing study, which looks not only at Masada, but at the whole issue of deception in science and the social construction of knowledge. Ben Yehuda considers the larger question of how society creates the symbolic moral boundaries between truth and deception, as well as the subtle interplay of science, politics, and ideology. This absorbing and thoroughly researched work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the construction of cultural meaning.
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