The most visible of Israel's antiquities preserves are in the 38 national parks, which certainly look well-tended with their broad, well-marked walkways, restrooms, landscaping and multitudes of pithy blue-and-white signs ("Crusader Fortress," "Cistern," "Palace"). The National Parks Authority's man-in-the-field, deputy director Israel Gilad, a simple, friendly and physical man who would clearly have preferred to take me out to the ruins rather than explain their preservation verbally in a cramped and humid Jerusalem magazine office, told me that these 38 parks are only the first in a long series of national parks-to-be. The government's national master plan, which designates where on the map of Israel future cities, roads, army camps and farmlands will go, has set aside about 80 parcels of land for the Authority to develop, some of them antiquities sites, others springs, groves, hilltops and battle sites. The future of at least these lucky sites seemed well in hand, I thought. "Of course," Israel cautioned, "we cannot develop these 80 within one year, or two years or 10 years, but we are in the process of developing them." Which, it turns out, was a hopeful pragmatist's way of saying that things are going very slow.

The Authority is pledged to developing one new park each year, but this apparently steady march of progress makes more difference on brochures and tourist maps than it does on the ground. Many of the old parks are but partially completed; they contain unrestored ruins, unbuilt restrooms and snack bars, unlandscaped picnic areas. Each year they receive a thin ration for new projects from the Authority's overburdened budget. Restoration taking as long as it does, work on even the year's official new park will be just gathering momentum when the Authority must turn its attention to the next new park on its list. And meanwhile the antiquities in the 80 parks-in-waiting not only erode (since the Authority doesn't have the money to spend on mere "potential parks"), they are practically barraged by activity going on around them. The parks-to-be are not pristine sanctuaries that no one may touch; rather, until they are officially "declared" parks, it is more or less open season on using their lands.

Take Bet Jubrin, this year's park-in-development, Israel began to explain: "The local kibbutzim had grazing rights on some of the land, and they didn't want to give them up. It was a long process of negotiation. Also, an army camp had a firing range in part of the national park. Here again, we had to find a compromise. We also had to coordinate our plans with the roadbuilders...." Only when all other claims to the property were settled could the park become "declared," the official responsibility of the National Parks Authority. Such a process can take three or four years, and for many of the parks-to-be it hasn't even begun.

The Authority, Israel explained, not only has many lands to develop but many needs to meet within them. The foreign tourists who come to see ancient ruins also want to see restrooms and coffee shops, walkways and stairs; the Israeli tourists tend to desire picnic grounds and waterfalls at the expense of antiquities. The small and volatile budget on which all of these must be built comes 90 percent from entrance fees and rents charged to concessionaires and only 10 percent from the treasury. When tourism declines, the revenues plummet. Now wouldn't I much rather go to Bet Jubrin than hear any more sad stories like these?

Still, like a master juggler who won't admit his limitations, the Parks Authority tries each year to make its budget stretch far enough to meet everybody's needs. It borrows from the parks that make money to pay for maintenance of those that don't. It forms partnerships with local authorities to manage nearby parks, usually fifty-fifty with all the profits reinvested. Israel Gilad drives from park to park most days of the week trying to make sure that all the projects move apace.

This year the big project at Caesarea is to build a new piazza; maybe next year there'll be the money to restore the crumbling Roman vaults, to rebuild an old archway that was wrongly put together.

The Myth or the Circus

When I had been interviewing archaeologists back in January, someone had recommended that I speak with Rivka Gonen, curator of Jewish ethnography at the Israel Museum, sometime excavator and, most important, outspoken and speculative conversationalist about the field of archaeology. She insisted we meet for lunch at Ticho House in Jerusalem, a 19th-century Arab villa that the museum now uses to show works of the painter Anna Ticho. The location was impressive. The vaulted ceilings had been restored, the walls painted dazzling white, and the huge windows thrown open like poor floodgates too weak to hold back the morning bath of sunlight. The perfect place for two ruin-lovers to retire from the urban landscape and discuss how antiquities should be preserved.

But I had misjudged Rivka Gonen. Preservation? she said. "It's really a matter of economic potential. To conserve a site is a very, very, very costly endeavor: not only to reconstruct it, but then the upkeep. I feel that if a great deal of public money goes into a project, there should be revenue to justify it. For archaeology it's enough to dig and to study and to understand. ...I don't say [an antiquities site] has to make a very large contribution to the economy, but enough people [have to] want to come and pay entrance fees and drink Coca-Cola on the side that they do not have to draw on other budgets." The question, in short, was a commercial - even a Darwinian - one: The sites that could draw in the shekels deserved to survive. From what Israel Gilad later told me, I figure that in one sweep this would throw out half the national parks.

Rivka joked that the archaeological purists would ostracize her for saying things like this - "You tell an archaeologist, `Why don't we convert one of the old houses into a cafe?' and he will kill you" - but by that time I'd come to realize that even the purists weren't pure. Knowing something about limited budgets themselves, they had gradually learned how to use phrases like "commercial potential" too. Rivka was actually riding the wave of the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which a site like Hammat Gader on the Jordanian border, home of the second largest Roman bath complex in the world, was partially restored by adding a modern spa, a cafeteria and (of all things) an alligator farm and producing a profit-making if undefinable conglomeration of it all.

"Look at this place," Rivka explained, gesturing at the Ticho villa around us. "There had been an old couple living here - very prominent: He was an eye doctor and his wife was Anna Ticho. When the old lady died, there was a chance that the whole place would be turned into a great big ruin. And so they have restored the place, reconstructed it. They opened the restaurant here, the public library, the garden. On the upper floor there is a gallery. They have concerts [and] cultural events - they have turned the place into something meaningful to the people of Jerusalem.

"You do not have to turn every citadel into a cafe or a restaurant, but it's very important to draw people with a variety of activities. Like the [Roman amphitheatre] at Caesarea: [I would tell them to] do more performances there. Have a kiosk there. Have a very pleasant coffee shop.... Build a museum. Do something that will be particular to Caesarea that you cannot find in other places." She suggested offhand a seafaring museum for one of the coastal towns, a museum of the date industry for Bet Shean. And of course there was Massada: "Every tourist that comes to this country goes to Massada. It's part of the myth, and so they do not have to build coffee shops on top; they don't have [to have] a circus." I quickly realized that in this conversation I was the purist, and the thought of building a circus on an archaeological site made me cringe.

I could not imagine holding several thousand years of history hostage to the passing touristic whims of this one peculiar age, but Rivka, who accepted the way things have to be much better than I, would say to it "Fine." Her capitalist credo was not dictated by her tastes; it showed a clearheaded appreciation of the extent of public poverty. "To draw on public budgets, which are so limited.... I feel it's more important to invest in schools - and I talk as an archaeologist, a professional - than to put it into sites that will then be empty and vacant, and you will have to fight the weeds that grow all over the place." This was an apt description of my Byzantine basilica if ever I had heard one.