History
The beginnings of the Palestine Exploration Fund are rooted in a literary society founded by British Consul James Finn and his wife Elizabeth Anne Finn. Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn. London. Marshall, Morgan,& Scott. 1929. p. 252. Many photographs of Palestine have survived from this period
On 22 June 1865, a group of Biblical archaeologists and clergymen financed the fund, with an initial fund of only £300. The most notable of the founders were Arthur P. Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, and George Grove, who later founded the Royal College of Music and was responsible for Grove's Dictionary of Music. Its founders established the Fund "for the purpose of investigating the Archaeology, Geography, manners, customs and culture, Geology and Natural History of the Holy Land."
The preliminary meeting of the Society of the Palestine Exploration Fund took place in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. William Thompson, the Archbishop of York, read out the original prospectus at the first organisational meeting;
ur object is strictly an inductive inquiry. We are not to be a religious society; we are not about to launch controversy; we are about to apply the rules of science, which are so well understood by us in our branches, to an investigation into the facts concerning the Holy Land. "No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted. At the same time no country more urgently requires illustration ... Even to a casual traveller in the Holy Land the Bible becomes, in its form, and therefore to some extent in its substance, a new book. Much would be gained by ...bringing to light the remains of so many races and generations which must lie concealed under the accumulation of rubbish and ruins on which those villages stand ...
The PEF conducted many early excavations of biblical and post biblical sites around the Levant, as well as studies involving natural history, anthropology, history and geography.
Among other noteworthy individuals associated with the fund were:
- Claude R. Conder
- Charles Warren
- Horatio Kitchener
- Edward Henry Palmer
- T. E. Lawrence
- Kathleen Kenyon
- Conrad Schick
- Charles Wilson
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