UBC hosts talk on excavation conducted next to Israeli torture camp

Megiddo is the site of one of the largest torture camps for Palestinians; the dig is right next to the prison

On November 18, 2025, the Vancouver chapter of the American Institute of Archaeology held a lecture on a Roman legionary camp called Legio located in Megiddo, Israel. The event took place at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and covered six years of a dig at the site.

The next day, the same speaker gave a department seminar on incarceration in the Roman Empire in UBC’s Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies (AMNE).

The site of Megiddo is currently excavated by the “Tel Aviv University Megiddo Expedition”, which is co-directed by Matthew J. Adams. The website dedicated to the project qualifies the site as the “Crown Jewel of Biblical Archaeology”. Dr Adams is also the co-director, with Israel Antiquities Authority’s (IAA) Dr. Yotam Tepper, of the excavation at Legio. An extension of Megiddo, Legio (a modern name which is the Latin word for “legion”) is part of the Jezreel Valley Regional Project. The excavation at Legio is funded by the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research with support from the IAA (which notably received funding from the Netivei Israel National Infrastructure Company).

Video: Teaser for the Legio 2023: Return to the Principia documentary

The project’s website describes Legio’s significance in those terms:

Legio is the site of the sprawling base of the Roman VIth Ferrata Legion. Established during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), the base controlled imperial roads, with direct access to the Galilee and inland valleys of northern Palestine—important centers of the local, occasionally uproarious, Jewish population. Excavations so far have demonstrated clear ties to major political and cultural events in the formative years of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity and have provided an incredible new window into the Roman military occupation of the eastern provinces.

What reports on Megiddo/Legio won’t specify is that the area is more than an archaeological site. In addition to Kibbutz Megiddo, which is built on the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Al-Lajjun, Megiddo is also the location of one of the largest prisons for Palestinians: Megiddo Central Prison.

Aerial and street-level pictures from Googlemap

Unsurprisingly, Megiddo Central Prison is not labelled as such in the 2025 “Legio – 2023” report. Instead, the site of the prison appears to be the only part of the aerial picture used by the team to have been pixelated:

We do, however, find the prison explicitly mapped, and mentioned, in a 2013 report on electromagnetic and archaeophysical investigations conducted at Legio. There, the authors specify that a “large-scale salvage excavation was conducted by [Yotam] Tepper on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) at the modern Megiddo prison compound on the southern edge of the site of Legio. These excavations suggested that this part of the site be identified as the historical village of Kefar ‘Othnay” [our bold].

While ancient Kefar ‘Othnay was the site of an ancient Christian praying hall, the prison that now stands on this very spot is far from being a spiritual place.

In a piece entitled “Israel’s Megiddo Prison: A tale of Torture Against Palestinian Minors and Adults” published in March 2025, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society notably writes the following about Megiddo Central Prison:

Megiddo Prison has long been one of the central prisons that witnesses egregious acts of torture, a reality that has only gotten much worse since the start of the ongoing genocide. It is one of the main prisons holding Palestinian detainees, and includes a section for child detainees and young men below 18 years of age.

Israeli occupation forces have circulated images of the systematic abuse that occurs there, showing prisoners being humiliated and tortured with the assistance of police dogs. According to testimonies and reports from legal teams who have visited the prison, Megiddo, like many other Israeli detention facilities, is also plagued by widespread disease and epidemics, which have only worsened in recent months. Among the most prominent diseases spreading there is Scabies skin disease, caused by a lack of hygiene, inadequate clothing, and overcrowding. This condition has led to the death of several detainees, and many others have suffered for months without receiving any medical treatment.

Image: Palestinian prisonners lying on their bellies with their hands zip-tied being abused by IOF forces and dogs; from footages made in September 2024 at Megiddo Central Prison and leaked by Haaretz (source: Social media via Al Mayadeen English)

Megiddo Central Prison is mentioned at the very opening of Israeli NGO B’Tselem’s August 2024 report Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps. The reference comes from the testimonial of one of the Palestinians who were detained there:

“We were taken to Megiddo. When we got off the bus, a soldier said to us: “Welcome to hell.””

From the testimony of Fouad Hassan 45, a father of five and resident of Qusrah in Nablus District, who was held in Megiddo Prison

In a 2025 report, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel detail the cases of seven Palestinians (including one teenager) who died at Megiddo Central Prison from what post-mortem autopsies reveal to be mistreatment and starvation.

The speaker who was hosted by UBC for the two talks mentioned above is University of Washington’s Carol Thomas Endowed Professor in Ancient History Mark Letteney. On his professional page, Dr Letteney describes himself as “an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation”.

In a 2023 interview to the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, Dr Letteney shared the following about how his “research and archaeological work interface with Jewish history” and what are his “hopes for leading students on digs”:

Through excavation we established that the site [of the village located next to the Roman camp at Legio], like the legionary base at Legio, was a monument of military occupation — it was built by the Roman army as part of the re-founding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, a Roman city built on the ruins of Jerusalem, excluding Jews. In these immense ancient infrastructure projects, we see the mechanics of occupation. And, through excavating the homes of those living just outside of a site of Legio, we glimpse the lives of locals negotiating a new world under a foreign and violent regime. […]

Before we embark on excavation at Legio, students will spend five days exploring Bronze and Iron Age sites to see the earliest evidence of complex societies in what is now the land of Israel [on the significance of the expression “Land of Israel”, see notably Nur Masalha’s 2007 The Bible and Zionism], before examining Roman, Byzantine, Mamluk and Ottoman sites which add to the rich history of the space, and in many cases still define the way that we think about the land today.

The Legio team is currently advertising its 2026 field school:

Get dirty, make discoveries, meet people from around the world, explore Israel!

In the documentary “Legio 2023” available on the Jezreel Valley Regonal Project, Dr Letteney is notably seen giving a lecture entitled “The Deep History of Incarceration” to the volunteers participating in the excavation (starts at 31:43). The parts of the lecture shown feature him discussing contemporary statistics about world carcerality, as well as the case of American prisons, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

Closer to us, in the introduction to their 2025 book Ancient Mediterranean Carcerality, Dr Letteney and Dr Matthew D.C. Larsen write the following about what the ancient sources they studied reveal on the relationship between foreign military occupation, Indigeneity, and carcerality:

We see evidence of remarkable disparities in carceral victimization, with indigenous and indigent people bearing the brunt of a carceral society that relied on bodily inputs to serve economic needs of the state. We find evidence of long-term solitary confinement, punitive food rations, a bureaucratic system for placing and keeping people in penal detention

What does it mean for Dr Letteney to teach and publish such content while excavating at a site located in an apartheid and genocidal State, on the land of an ethnically cleansed village, right next to a prison where members of a militarily occupied Indigenous population are tortured and killed by the occupiers? What does it mean for him to build a career out of being an expert in the history of incarceration and the archaeology of military occupation while an accelerated, and livestreamed, genocide is unfolding on the land whose ancient military occupation his research capitalizes on?

As for UBC: That the university hosted Dr Letteney for these two talks shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, as stated in a statement put forward by UBC students, the Department of AMNE is involved in a field school in Occupied Palestine that takes place in the context of a UBC/Hebrew University of Jerusalemm (HUJI) collaboration:

Gregg Gardner, an Associate Professor with tenure in the AMNE department, runs an archeological field school in Occupied Palestine in an occupied part of al-Khalil (“Hebron”) at a site renamed as “horvat midras.” Zionists destroyed Palestinian villages in the area such as Bayt Nattif and ethnically cleansed the area of its Palestinian inhabitants. Today, the land is known as the ““Adullam Grove Nature Reserve”

In 2025, The Horvat Midras (Israel) Archaeological Project, which Dr Gardner co-directs with Orit Peleg-Barkat from HUJI, was awarded the Stevan B. Dana Fund for Projects in Israel by the American School of Overseas Research.

Archaeology is not the only area where UBC is complicit with Israeli apartheid. Indeed, as Sparrows for Palestine Collective wrote in a previous post that draws from findidfsoldiers.net, a pediatric orthopedist who went to serve as a reserve fighter in the IOF during the genocide in Gaza is also affiliated with UBC. Not only is the medical doctor in question, Dr Dynai Eilig, still working as Clinical Assistant Professor at UBC' Medicine’s Department of Orthopaedics, but he was also granted a fellowship for the 2025-2026 academic year.

The case of UBC platforming excavations conducted in partnership with Israeli institutions that are actively complicit with apartheid and genocide next to an Israeli torture camp (Legio) and in Occupied Palestine (Horvat Midra) is yet another blatant example of how archaeology is one of the pillars of what Francesca Albanese calls the ideological scaffolding of Israeli apartheid. It also poses the questions of the university’s anti-Palestinian racism and, more broadly, of its commitment to international law and equity.

Addendum

Shortly after we published this post, Classicist Dr Siobhán McElduff (“1st gen Irish (Donegal/Sligo) settler in Canada”) posted a potent thread in reaction to it on Bluesky. With her permission, we quote it here:

When I was under 1, my dad was arrested in the UK. As was the standard procedure, he had the beating of his life and was left on a cell floor to reflect on the errors of his ways. He got 3 years in a max security jail. One of the men arrested with him died on hunger strike.

One of my uncles got interned twice without trial. Another took and won a case on illegal arrests under the interment act. He won, and they rearrested him on the steps of the court. But properly this time. Etc.

This is not the most usual academic background, which is why things like this happen.

This is also why the comforting’ presence ‘of the RCMP and so on in various places is not comforting to some.

We absolutely need a more diverse academia, or we’ll do this stuff forever.

I have a lot more specific feelings about this, but I think it’s better to talk about how things like this don’t strike many people in academia as sensitive subjects because their backgrounds are so secure, and they’ve never had to consider issues of this nature.

Anyway, love remembering being strip-searched at 16 while doing academic work!

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