Is biblical archaeology dead in the water? Not by a long shot.
First, while the Albrightian paradigm has been somewhat marginalized, there certainly are enough who still proudly profess it. This includes practicing American archaeologists like R. Younkers and R. Tappey, and Israelis like Eilat Mazar, as well as several universally acclaimed older scholars like F. M. Cross and K. Kitchen. With the bulk of lay support squarely behind it and the re-emergence of intellectual conservatism in academia, it is certainly too early to pronounce its demise.
Second, whereas archaeology has by and large divorced itself from biblical studies, it is questionable whether the opposite is warranted, or indeed possible. For scholars whose field of interest is the emergence of monotheism, the archaeology of the Levant offers the only possibility of testing hypotheses against empirical evidence. The very supposition that the biblical text is complexly constructed and multifocal means that to get to its historical kernel (and nearly all biblical scholars believe that there is some historicity behind some of the texts) one need constantly re-examine the facts (or ‘factoids’ as some postprocessualists would have it) provided by archaeology in light of competing textually based hypotheses. Needless to say, such endeavor would not be possible if the veracity of the text is the departure point for the building of the archaeological scenario.
Third, while there is no doubt that biblical (and classical) archaeology have not fared well in the era of processualism, they have every chance of flourish-ingin a postprocessual climate (see Postprocessual Archaeology). If the purpose of archaeology is defined as searching for some universal laws of human behavior, and the preferred method of doing so is ‘reading’ the ‘archaeological record’ with the aid of some simple ‘transforms’ or ‘middle range theory’ which would make redundant the engagement with actual texts, then the archaeology of the Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages becomes one test case among many in the anthropologist’s cache, and a pretty problematic one at that. If, however, one defines archaeology as the engagement between text and context, or the study of how people construct their past, then the intensive study of a tiny patch of ground from which different and competing ideologies hail becomes a fascinating theme. For this, we need to stop looking at the Bible as a collection of historical ‘benchmarks’ and to consider it as an expression of ideology - to be compared with material expressions that we find in the ground. Both types of artifacts should then be regarded as gaming pieces which we the players continually rearrange in order to construct our own differing views of how the world of the present came to be. This is exactly what some younger scholars, for example, S. Bunimovitz, A. Faust, or B. Routledge, are doing.
See also: Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant; Classical Archaeology; Middle Range Approaches; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology.
World History
