Stones Unturned - NYTimes.com RAMALLAH, West Bank - Walking through the hills around Ramallah, where I have lived for many years, I often come upon archeological ruins and remnants: Byzantine tombs, Ottoman olive presses, pottery shards. They lie there, scattered among stone walls and olive trees, unmarked and unstudied. But a few days ago at Khirbet El Tireh I was pleasantly surprised to find under a green canopy the archeologist Salah Hussein Al-Houdalieh and his students from Al Quds University loading off buckets of stones, scraping dirt and dusting a mosaic floor. The site, which sits on top of a high hill a few miles from the Old City, is believed to date back to the Roman Empire, Houdalieh told me. It includes fortifications, stone dwellings, a Byzantine church, water cisterns and olive and grape presses. Khirbet El Tireh's existence, as well as its significance, has long been known. It was first mentioned in the 1882-1888 Survey of Western Palestine by the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund. Greek Orthodox faithful - the largest Christian community in Palestine - who believe the site to be the first burial place of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, hold open-air prayers here every August. Houdalieh told me that he hopes to find St. Stephen's grave. But he and his students may not manage in the month and a half they have to complete the work. He has been carrying out excavations throughout the West Bank every summer since 1992, when Al Quds University opened the Institute of Archeology, and throughout that time has been hampered by inadequate funding. The Prince Claus Fund is contributing 30,000 euros for the Khirbet El Tireh project, which also includes preparing the site for tourism and educating the local community about the importance of archeology. But the dig isn't being supported by the Palestinian Authority itself. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage may operate only in the areas of the West Bank over which the Palestinian Authority has jurisdiction, the so-called Areas A and B. (It may not operate in Area C, which falls under Israel's jurisdiction.) What's more, its work focuses on restoring sites that have already been unearthed. It has undertaken only a very limited number of new excavations over the past two decades. When it has, the digs have usually been aimed at ensuring that there are no ruins of significance so that new construction can begin. In the case of Khirbet El Tireh, building licenses were issued despite evidence that archeological ruins were present. Of the original six acres at Khirbet El Tireh only about 1.5 are exposed today; the rest have been covered up in recent years with apartment blocks, two schools, a gas station and a wide road. And when historical sites in the West Bank aren't being built over, they are often left unguarded and unmaintained - leaving them at risk of being damaged or looted, as Houdalieh wrote in a paper published last year. Why this relative neglect? Lack of expertise, budget constraints and competing priorities all play a part. But I also suspect a surprising kind of complacency: Despite their longstanding struggle to win political rights from Israel, Palestinians may be taking for granted that the land around them, and its buried heritage, is theirs. Certainly their attitude is different from that of the Israeli government. At the Canaanite ruins of Khirbet Rodana, a few miles east of Ramallah, excavations took place as long as Israel had full control over the area, before the Oslo Accords. But when the Palestinian Authority took over, they stopped, and a developer was later allowed to build a high-rise without the required clearance from the Department of Antiquities. In the course of its 46-year occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel has carried out thousands of excavations. Even since the Oslo Accords, it has done so with impunity in the so-called Area C - the 60 or so percent of the West Bank that it controls and which includes important tourist sites like Herodium and Qumran. Annex III of the 1995 Interim Agreement between Israel and the Palestinians provides that all powers and responsibilities to do with archeology should gradually be transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction, but this has still not happened. Indeed, most the artifacts displayed at the recent exhibit about King Herod the Great at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem were removed illegally from sites in the occupied West Bank. "Archaeologists are in the business of creating collective memories," the Israeli archaeologist Raphael Greenberg has argued. This is something the Israelis understand only too well and the Palestinians, apparently, too little.