Israel Antiquities Authority

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The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) (before 1990, the Israel Department of Antiquities) is an independent Israeli governmental authority responsible for enforcing the 1978 Law of Antiquities by regulating excavation and conservation, and by promoting research.

The current Director-General of the IAA is Shuka Dorfmann and its offices are housed within the building of the Rockefeller Museum.

[edit] History

The Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (IDAM) of the Ministry of Education was founded on July 26, 1948, during the establishment of the State of Israel. It continued the function of the Department of Antiquities of the British Mandate Government, after partition of Palestine. Its activities were originally based on the British Mandate Department of Antiquities ordinances.

It functioned as the statutory arm of the Government of Israel responsible for the state's antiquities and for the administration of small museums. It had a number of major functions including: curation of the state collection of antiquities, storing of the state collection, maintaining a list of registered antiquities sites, inspecting antiquities sites and registering newly discovered sites, conducting salvage and rescue operations of endangered antiquities sites, maintaining an archaeological library (the state library), maintaining an archive, publishing results of excavations in three journals (Alon of the Department of Antiquities [Hebrew]--now defunct, 'Atiqot [Hebrew and English]--still published, Hadashot Arkheologiyot [Hebrew and English]--still published, but only on the internet. It also funded and managed the Archaeological Survey of Israel and published the results of its work in maps covering 10 km² of the State of Israel.

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) was created from the IDAM by the Knesset (parliament) at the instigation of its last director, Amir Drori, in a 1999 statute. Amir Drori then became the first director of the IAA. The IAA fulfilled the statutory obligations of the IDAM and in its early days was greatly expanded from the core number of workers in IDAM to a much larger complement, and to include the functions of the Archaeological Survey of Israel. The period of expansion lasted for a number of years, but was followed by a period in which diminished fiscal resources saw large cutbacks in the size of its work force and its activities. It remains a large, active, vital institution.