The next methodological breakthrough in field work started after the ten-year hiatus in archaeological activity imposed by World War II and the ensuing Arab-Israeli wars. In her excavations in Jericho (1952-58) and Jerusalem (1961-67), Kathleen Kenyon implemented what came to be called the ‘Wheeler-Kenyon’ or ‘balk and debris layer’ method of excavation. Kenyon’s work on pottery - especially the seriation of tomb deposits from her own excavation at Jericho and those of the Chicago excavation at Megiddo - is also exemplary. However, her conception of historical process, as seen from the textbooks she wrote, is narrow diffusionism. She equated the succession of archaeological ‘cultures’ she defined with successive ‘waves’ of migration and conquest by wild ‘tribes’ from the sea, the desert, or the steppes - Amorites, Hyksos, Israelites, and Philistines being cases in point.
Albright’s American students began a project in Shechem (Tell Balata) in 1952, and the Israelis, under Yadin, the last of the ‘digging soldiers’, began excavating in Hazor in 1958. These projects were hugely influential in as much as almost all the next generation of field archaeologists were trained in them and the techniques used in them became known as the ‘American’ versus ‘Israeli’ excavation ‘schools’. Both were attempts at compromise between the horizontally oriented ‘locus to stratum’ method and the vertically oriented ‘balk and debris layer’. The ‘Israelis’ inclined toward larger exposures and faster excavation and tended to keep and publish mainly primary assemblages and complete forms, while the ‘Americans’ stressed meticulously separating and recording all types of deposits and assemblages - which made for smaller exposures and slower excavation. Interpretation-wise, however, both ‘schools’ correctly saw themselves as faithful followers of Albright. Indeed, G. E. Wright - director of the Shechem excavations and a leader in the neoorthodox movement in biblical theology - was arguably even more extreme than Albright in his notion of ‘‘God who acts in history’’.
Even though ‘biblical archaeology’s’ rules of engagement of biblical text and archaeological record seemed to be accepted - at least initially - by everyone, a series of debates through the latter half of the twentieth century progressively eroded the Albrightian paradigm.
Within biblical studies, Albright and his students did not stem the tide of deconstruction, and his intellectual fundamentalism remained a minority position. Indeed, by the 1970s and 1980s, extreme doubt in the historicity of the entire ‘Deuteronomistic narrative’ (the books of Deuteronomy through Kings - thought to represent a single ‘source’), gave rise to the so-called ‘minimalist’ or ‘nihilist’ school, which essentially replaced the concept of (late) redaction of the texts with (even later) ‘invention’, that is, the biblical stories are seen by proponents of this school as ‘pious fraud’ of postexilic Jews. While this other extreme also remains a minority position in biblical studies, it cannot be ignored by archaeologists in as much as it argues that any attempt to draw on some biblical ‘reality’ to aid the location of sites and interpretation of the archaeological record is tantamount to mounting an expedition to excavate Treasure Island.
Attempts by Albright and others to situate the patriarchal narratives in the reality of the Middle Bronze Age or portray Joseph as a Hyksos prince lost favor as early as the 1950s, as most biblical scholars and archaeologists came to deny any but the haziest recollection of the Bronze Age in the stories of Genesis.
The failure to find any ‘wandering Israelites’ in the Late Bronze Age foiled attempts to trace the route of the Exodus - especially as Sinai, the Negev, and the trans-Jordanian deserts became well explored in the 1970s and 1980s and thousands of nomadic sites of other periods, from Palaeolithic to modern Bedouin, were located.
One of the most notable ‘defections’ from Albright’s camp was when Y. Aharoni, Yadin’s principal aide-de-camp, accepted a source critique by A. Alt, who claimed that the books of Joshua and Judges represent rival traditions of how the Israelites came to occupy the Land of Israel, rather than a single narrative sequence of ‘conquest’ and then ‘settlement’. Aharoni claimed that the archaeological record favored - if not conclusively proved - the ‘peaceful penetration’ tradition over ‘conquest’. The rift between Yadin and Aharoni caused the latter to leave the institute in Jerusalem and establish a department in the new Tel Aviv University, which would become increasingly critical of the Albrightian paradigm.
By the 1980s, following the work of several of Aharoni’s students in Tel Aviv (most notably
I. Finkelstein) and several ‘younger generation’ Americans (e. g., D. Esse and A. Joffe), the appearance of ‘Israelite’ highland villages at the beginning of the Iron Age came to be seen by most archaeologists as some combination of sedentization of locally mobile agropastoralists and ruralization of indigenous urban populations following the collapse of the Bronze Age world system. ‘Migration’ and ‘conquest’ had all but disappeared from the lexicon. In ‘biblical archaeology’ terminology, these views would fall somewhere between Alt’s ‘peaceful penetration’ model and Mendenhall’s ‘peasant revolution’ - but they really have more to do with the impact of ‘processual archaeology’ than any particular interpretation of the biblical stories of the origins of Israel (see Processual Archaeology).
Another one of the debates in the 1980s raged over the very name of the discipline. W. Dever, one of the ablest spokesmen for the profession, argued that a community no longer made up of linguists, missionaries, kibbutzniks, or spies, and a discipline no longer focused on the Bible, should not be named after a text. The name he proposed, however - ‘Syro-Palestinian Archaeology’ - was rejected by some Americans for religious reasons and by some Israelis for political ones. The alternative - ‘Archaeology of the Land of Israel’ - was unacceptable to Arabs. (So as to stay on the straight and narrow politically correct path, this author hereby declares that this article uses the terms ‘Palestine’, ‘Israel’, and ‘Southern Levant’ interchangeably; that the term ‘Israel’ - except when utilized in a modern political context - is used in the
Biblical sense; and that the use of ‘Palestine’ and ‘Israel’ in no way implies a judgment about the rights of any modern political entity to any territory and/or the borders of any such entity - past, present, or future.) The only result of this unresolved argument was the changing of the name of the semipopular ASOR journal from Biblical Archaeologist to Near Eastern Archaeology - which promptly caused a drop in circulation.
The last decade of the twentieth century brought another argument to the fore. Finkelstein’s ‘low Iron Age chronology’ - dating the Iron Age I to c. 1125925 BCE instead of c. 1200-1000 as traditionally maintained - is not a large correction in absolute terms. However, it divorces the appearance of decorated ‘Philistine’ pottery in the lowlands and of the ‘Israelite’ settlements in the highlands from the Egyptian references to ‘i-s-r/l-r/l’ and ‘p-r/l-s-t’ at the time of Marneptah and Ramesses III. Moreover, it supports the ‘minimalist’ claim that the ‘United Kingdom’ of David and Solomon is more a ‘golden period’ fantasy than historical reality in as much as it claims that state formation in the highlands postdates the reigns allotted to Saul, David, and Solomon in the biblical king lists.
From the fundamentalists’ point of view, the critical fracture between religion and archaeology had already been passed. Once the covenants of Abraham and Moses come - in archaeologists’ eyes - to be classified as legend or allegory, it is of little import whether or not the biblical king lists are historiographic. From the point of view of archaeological method, however, it may well be that the chronological debates mark the final demise of the Albrightian paradigm. Proponents of both sides have now shifted the criteria for the absolute dating of archaeological horizons from historical/textual ‘conjunctions’ to chronometric dating (mainly radiocarbon). Albright’s basic stance of ‘guarded credulity’ had irrevocably changed to ‘qualified skepticism’: no biblical mention can be relied on unless corroborated by independent evidence.
Three developments in the way archaeology is practiced in the Near East led to the increasing estrangement between Bible and archaeology after World War II. These are (in more or less chronological order) the increasing involvement of locals in the local archaeology, the rise of professionalism within archaeology, and the rise of environmental conservationism. The founding of independent states in place of Western mandates or protectorates in the Near East was followed in short order by the establishment of antiquities services manned by locals, who increasingly are graduates of indigenous departments of archaeology. The placement of Near Eastern archaeologists in general institutes of archaeology has also served to make them more responsive to trends in archaeological theory and practice and less attuned to the biblical studies community. This has arguably been less the case in the North American and German systems, where Near Eastern archaeologists often operate from departments of Near Eastern studies or religion. Finally, the motivation of the bulk of archaeological fieldwork nowadays is salvage operations and resource management. As such, practitioners see themselves as operating within an environmental paradigm, and often have little background or interest in humanities or the Bible.
World History
