Biblical Archaeology_A Very Short Introduction Page 4

  Albright used the results of his excavations and other researches to write numerous books, some for an academic audience and some, like From the Stone Age to Christianity, for the general public. He frequently split the academic year between Johns Hopkins University, where he was chairman of the Oriental Seminary, and his home at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem (which was renamed the William F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in 1970 and is now usually referred to simply as “the Albright”). Albright served as director of the American School for most of the 1920s and 1930s. Established in 1900, the school is the oldest American research center for ancient Near Eastern studies in the Middle East. A number of other foreign-sponsored schools of archaeology were established (or expanded) in Jerusalem at approximately the same time, including the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, the École Biblique et Archéologique Française, and the British School of Archaeology.

  Table 2. Archaeological periods in the Holy Land, ca. 8500–586 BCE (adapted from Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000–586 BCE [London: Doubleday, 1992] 30, Table 2).

  In the 1930s and 1940s, a new figure on the scene, Nelson Glueck, alternated with and then replaced Albright as the director of the American School. Glueck had arrived in Palestine in 1926, already an ordained rabbi but with a desire to study archaeology. He became Albright’s student at the American School and excavated with him at Tell Beit Mirsim, eventually becoming an expert in both pottery and stratigraphy.

  Glueck is perhaps best known for conducting a series of surveys and explorations in Transjordan, at that time a relatively unknown area, archaeologically speaking. He advanced the field of biblical archaeology by identifying hundreds of ancient sites in this region, which corresponded to the biblical kingdoms of Edom, Moab, and Ammon. Glueck also surveyed in the Sinai, the Negev, and the Jordan Valley, for in addition to being an archaeologist and a rabbi, he was a spy who worked for the Office of Strategic Services—the predecessor of the CIA. Just as Lawrence and Woolley had surveyed in the Negev as cover for a military operation before World War I, so too Glueck’s archaeological surveys before World War II served as cover for determining potable water sources and possible escape routes for the Allied forces to use if the Germans were victorious in Africa and subsequently invaded Palestine.

  Particularly during his much later excavations at the site of Gezer, Glueck trained a number of future archaeologists, many of whom are still active in the field. However, he achieved perhaps his greatest prominence when he merged his archaeological training with his rabbinical training, becoming president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, a position he held from 1947 until his death in 1971. Although the primary mission of Hebrew Union College is to train Reform rabbis and cantors, Glueck was convinced that a knowledge of archaeology went hand in hand with a knowledge of the Bible and was instrumental in opening a branch campus in Jerusalem, in addition to a School of Biblical and Archaeological Studies (now renamed the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, located on the HUC campus in Jerusalem).

  During this interwar period, James Henry Breasted and archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago began a major series of excavations at the site of Megiddo. Sponsored by the Rockefeller family, the expedition ran continuously from 1925 until 1939 and stopped only when World War II erupted. This was the longest uninterrupted period of excavation at the site until the current Tel Aviv University excavations began in 1992.

  The Chicago excavators lived at the site virtually year round, digging with hundreds of local and Egyptian workmen who sometimes excavated unsupervised while the American archaeologists lay ill with malaria, too sick to get out of bed in the expedition house. When first beginning to excavate at Megiddo, they used a new technique known as horizontal excavation, in which the stratigraphical layers of the tell were “peeled off” one by one, from the top down. Eventually, after painstakingly removing the top two layers of occupation (Strata I and II, dating to the early Hellenistic and Persian periods respectively) and revealing the third layer (Stratum III, dating to the Neo-Assyrian period), the excavators, their money showing signs of running out, had had enough of horizontal excavation and switched to conventional vertical excavation techniques. These included digging a step-trench down the side of the mound, by means of which they eventually reached all the way down to bedrock and were able to ascertain the sequential history of the site. They established that there were at least twenty cities built on top of one another at Megiddo, stretching from 3000 BCE to 300 BCE, complete with palaces, temples, ivory treasures, and plentiful evidence of how the ancient peoples of Canaan and Israel had lived.

  During their excavations, the Chicago excavators built a small railroad around the top of the mound, whose sole purpose was to carry away the tons of soil being removed by the workmen. The spoil heaps that were created by the dumping of this soil next to the tell are a prominent part of the Megiddo landscape today—with flowers and grass growing on them in the spring and cows grazing upon them in the summer—and are frequently mistaken by tourists as outlying sections of the ancient site, which they are not. It was on one of these mounds that a local kibbutznik, grazing his sheep and goats during the 1950s, found a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh inscribed on a clay tablet. Clearly, like Schumacher before them, the Chicago excavators occasionally missed ancient artifacts, which then wound up on, or in, the spoil heaps of removed earth.

  The Chicago archaeologists thought they saw the handiwork of Solomon at Megiddo. They identified several buildings at the site as stables, citing in particular the description in 1 Kings of ”chariot cities” belonging to Solomon: “And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen; he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horsemen, whom he stationed in the chariot cities and with the king in Jerusalem” (1 Kings 10:26). The proper identification of these buildings was the source of debate among archaeologists for the remaining decades of the twentieth century. While some agreed that these were stables, others saw them as storehouses, barracks, marketplaces, or fulfilling some other unidentified purpose. In 1998, the Tel Aviv University expedition to Megiddo uncovered another “stable” at the site and settled the debate by identifying numerous features that circumstantially point to stables as being the correct identification. Unfortunately it is by no means clear that these stables were built by Solomon. They could have been built by Omri, Ahab, Jeroboam II, or any one of a number of other kings who lived and ruled in the Northern Kingdom of Israel long after Solomon died.

  Interestingly, at the same time that the Chicago archaeologists were excavating at Megiddo, a consortium of other archaeologists known as the Joint Expedition was excavating not too far away, having renewed excavations at the site of ancient Samaria, which had once been the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and which had earlier been the focus of Reisner’s Harvard University expedition. As part of this new expedition, archaeologists from the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as several other institutions, dug at the site from 1931 to 1935. Among these archaeologists was Kathleen Kenyon, who had begun her archaeological career working in South Africa with Gertrude Caton-Thompson and in Britain with Mortimer Wheeler. This was her first excavation in Palestine, though she would later go on to greater fame by excavating at Jericho and Jerusalem.

  When Kenyon joined the team to help excavate Samaria, she brought with her a revolutionary method of excavating, which had been developed in Britain by Wheeler. In this system, excavators pay careful attention to differences in the color, texture, and other characteristics of the soil and of the ancient remains. The collection buckets (or boxes) for pottery and artifacts are changed every time a difference is noted, thereby allowing the digging to be done according to the observable stratigraphy (as opposed to digging rigidly, ten centimeters at a time, as some earlier excavators had done). Moreover, the excavati
ng is done in squares measuring exactly five meters by five meters, with one-meter-wide sections—known as balks—left standing between the squares. These balks not only serve as paths for the archaeologists and workers to walk upon, but their vertical faces—called “sections” (as in cross-sections)—clearly show the history of the excavated area. Layers upon layers are drawn and photographed at the end of the season and subsequently published in the excavation reports, allowing the stratigraphy of the site to be examined and reexamined as necessary, not only by the original excavators but by subsequent archaeologists as well.

  5. Overhead of Areas K and Q at Megiddo, end of the 2008 season. The use of Kenyon-Wheeler 5m × 5m squares in a grid pattern, with one-meter-wide balks between, can be clearly seen.

  This new, more precise method of stratigraphical excavation, which is arguably the most accurate and sensitive means of digging, became known as the Kenyon-Wheeler method of excavation. It is still the principal method used by archaeologists digging in the Holy Land and elsewhere, although it has been modified to a certain extent by some Israeli archaeologists who use it in conjunction with broad horizontal excavations, to expose more of a single layer of the site at one time in a controlled manner.

  Chapter 4

  After 1948: biblical veracity and nationalism

  Biblical archaeology entered a new phase after the end of World War II, and more precisely after the Israeli War of Independence of 1948. It was a phase known for the re-examination and excavation of sites that contained possible links between ancient Israelites and modern Israelis, in order to both construct a national narrative and continue to explore the veracity of the biblical account.

  In 1951 Kathleen Kenyon was appointed director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (now renamed the Kenyon Institute in her honor) and soon thereafter began work at the site of Jericho. Her excavations there from 1952 to 1958 employed the successful Kenyon-Wheeler method of vertical excavation, resulting in some very important discoveries.

  Kenyon had been asked to excavate at Jericho because of questions that had been raised by John Garstang’s previous excavations at the site from 1931 to 1936. Garstang had not been the first to dig at Jericho, for Charles Warren, Ernst Sellin, and Carl Watzinger had all excavated there before him, but contrary to those previous excavators who dated the destruction of City IV at the site to 1550 BCE, Garstang suggested that the city had been destroyed in about 1400 BCE, specifically by Joshua and the invading Israelites, as described in the biblical account (Josh. 6:1–20). However, his announcement of this interpretation met with severe criticism from some quarters—in fact, it has been described as the most famous faux pas in the history of biblical archaeology—so he asked Kenyon to recommence the excavations in order to check his results and conclusions.

  Garstang based his date for the destruction of Jericho in part upon an absence of imported Mycenaean pottery from Greece at the site. Such pottery is commonly found at Canaanite sites in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE; that there was none at Jericho meant, according to Garstang, that the city must have been destroyed before this period, i.e., by the year 1400 BCE. Garstang believed that the city wall had fallen as the result of an earthquake at that time and that the city had been destroyed by the invading Israelites, who had presumably taken advantage of the earthquake.

  Using her superior excavation methods, Kenyon established that the site had indeed been destroyed about 1550 BCE, as the previous excavators thought, rather than 1400 BCE, as Garstang suggested. In addition to the lack of imported Mycenaean pottery from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, she pointed out that there was also a lack of pottery from the earlier LB I (Late Bronze I) period, dating to 1550 to 1400 BCE, which suggested that the site had been destroyed at the beginning of that period rather than at the end. As for the city wall that Garstang had found, it may have been destroyed by an earthquake, but it did not belong to City IV. In fact, its destruction had taken place a thousand years earlier, about 2400 BCE.

  According to Kenyon’s findings, Jericho had remained essentially deserted for the rest of the Late Bronze Age and into the early part of the Iron Age. It was therefore uninhabited at the time of Joshua and the coming of the Israelites. Thus, the archaeological findings and the biblical account are asymmetrical (or inconsistent with each other) at a site fundamentally important to the account of the Israelite conquest as Jericho. Although the debate over Jericho continues to this day, only a few biblical archaeologists still agree with Garstang’s position; the rest agree with Kenyon.

  In fact, Garstang himself came to bitterly regret linking his excavation data from Jericho to the biblical passages concerning Joshua’s capture of the city. He was a careful archaeologist who served as the first director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and instituted British policy toward antiquities in the region. He was also one of the scholars who worked with Albright in 1922 to create the chronological terminology used henceforth in the field. It is quite possible that Garstang was unduly influenced by his own wife, who wrote the chapter linking Jericho’s destruction to Joshua, and by the primary sponsor of his excavations, Sir Charles Marston, who sought to use archaeology to prove the Bible. If so, this may be the earliest example of a sponsor possibly affecting or influencing the interpretation of excavation data, which is still considered to be a potential problem in current biblical archaeology.

  Besides Samaria and Jericho, Kenyon excavated in Jerusalem for a number of years, beginning in 1961. Her most important discovery in the area was that of the so-called Stepped Stone Structure, which is usually thought to have been part of the original Jebusite (or Canaanite) defensive system of the city, dating back to the Bronze Age. Unfortunately, she died before fully publishing the results of her excavations at Jericho and Jerusalem, and it would be decades before other scholars published the results for her.

  Apart from Kenyon, perhaps the best-known biblical archaeologist active during this immediate postwar period was Yigael Yadin. Yadin had three full careers: As a military leader, he served, among many other duties, as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As a politician, he served as deputy prime minister in the government of Menachem Begin. As an archaeologist, he was a faculty member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  His military and political careers notwithstanding, Yadin was quite literally born to be an archaeologist. He was the son of Eliezer Sukenik, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem scholar who bought the first three Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, when Yadin was a thirty-year-old university student. After serving as Head of Operations during the 1948 war and then as chief of staff of the IDF, Yadin went back to school, eventually writing his PhD thesis on the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Later, as a university professor and mentor, Yadin taught an entire generation of future archaeologists and initiated or restarted excavations at many sites, including Megiddo. He was not only interested in establishing an Israeli national identity with regard to ancient evidence for a Jewish presence in the land, but—like his American counterpart Albright—thought that archaeology could help prove the accuracy and authenticity of the Bible.

  Yadin’s first substantial excavations took place at Hazor, located in the north of Israel. The British archaeologist John Garstang had already dug there in 1928, but it was Yadin whose excavations from 1955 to 1958—undertaken on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and sponsored in part by the Rothschild family—brought the site to life. Yadin enjoyed the unflagging support of David Ben-Gurion—the first prime minister of Israel—because his excavations helped Ben-Gurion to create an identity for the new state of Israel. The Hazor excavations were essentially a national effort, with the workmen supplied by the state. Yadin’s staff members were among the best available; many of his area supervisors, in charge of separate portions of the dig, went on to become established professors of archaeology or key figures in the Department of Antiquities.

  At the site, Yadin uncovere
d the remains of a huge Canaanite city that had flourished during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, and especially during the second millennium BCE. He concluded that Hazor was a major metropolis, a city that was mentioned in texts written as far away as Mari in Mesopotamia during the eighteenth century BCE. The city, during this early period, was protected by a massive sloping earthen rampart, known as a glacis, which was ninety meters wide and fifteen meters high. The glacis gave the site a distinctive shape, which can best be seen today when approaching from the south.

  At Hazor, Yadin also uncovered the remains of a city dating to the Late Bronze Age and probably specifically to the thirteenth century BCE, which had been destroyed by fire. Based upon his dating of this destruction, from pottery and other artifacts found in the ruins, Yadin attributed the burning of this city to the invading Israelites who, according to the biblical tradition, captured and burnt Hazor during their conquest of Canaan (Josh. 11:10–13). This confirmed, for him, the biblical accounts of the Israelite conquest of Canaan and, therefore, the claims of modern Jews to the ancient land of Israel.