Archaeology is bound to map making and all too often to the political self-serving interpretation passing for scientific history. It rarely escapes the ideology and material interests that accompany and fashion them. It is certainly not cleaning and revealing a mossy, gummed up reality that would be already there, waiting for a properly directed and timely discovery. This self-authorizing discovery is framed as a new, scientific “witnessing” or “viewing” —whether this viewing, scoping, or graphing is that of post-Enlightenment Christians, or the presumptuous, supposed detachment of modern western scholarship. It is making (up) this “reality” while posing as an impartial witness to it. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London: Routledge, second edition, 2008). And Abu El-Haj, N. Facts on the ground: archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)