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We are all in shock about this. He had been with us for many years and was well respected,’ Mark Taylor said. ’ This meant it must therefore have come from the Israelis. Three days after the killing, the PLO broadcast a statement on their Algiers radio station, Voice of Palestine. The statement set the murder squarely in the front line of the Israel – Palestine conflict, making the simple, obvious equation that Glock was the victim of a political assassination because of the political potency of his archaeological work, and that Israel was responsible for it.

Now in the same place, four years after the Oslo Agreement had introduced limited Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories, the precarious truce between Israel and Palestine was symbolized by groups of young Palestinian Authority policemen, strolling about with nothing better to do than check the licences of the taxis that plied the two kilometres to the Birzeit campus. The moment of the murder was lost and buried; it was now ancient history. I had a copy of the autopsy in my suitcase.

Ti’innik is a hamlet in the northernmost part of the West Bank, a few kilometres north of the town of Jenin in the flat, green Jezreel valley, near the biblical site of Megiddo, better known as Armageddon, where the Book of Revelation prophesies that the battle to end all earthly battles will be fought. The village stands at the foot of an ancient man-made mound called Tell Ti’innik, which is almost certainly the site mentioned in the Bible as the Canaanite stronghold of Taanach. In 1987, Glock and Maya al-Farabi took the radical step of excavating, not the parts of the site that relate to biblical history, which had been the dominant interest of the archaeology of Palestine since archaeology began in the Holy Land in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the more recent Ottoman remains which had been largely ignored by archaeologists.