The next revolution in archaeological fieldwork in the Levant was the introduction of the Reisner-Fisher ‘locus to stratum’ excavation method just before World War I. Finds were labeled by their ‘locus’ (as defined by this system - the space circumscribed by a single set of walls) and ‘loci’ were grouped into buildings and ‘strata’ on architectural grounds. Despite its limitations, this system was a great improvement over Petrie’s arbitrary horizontal slices, and still fit the logistical structure of most ‘expeditions’ at the time - a horde of ‘native workmen’ directed by a minimal crew whose main expertise was in linguistics, theology, or art. With the resumption of fieldwork after the halt imposed by World War I and the establishment of British mandate over Palestine (and French over Syria), most of the large-scale excavation projects switched over to the ‘locus to stratum’ method.
For all their crudeness, these projects - often involving clearance of large tracts by hundreds of workers - exposed city plans and large assemblages of artifacts, which served as the basis for working out detailed artifact typologies and relative chronological sequences. By 1922, the directors of the foreign schools in Jerusalem accepted the chronological framework and terminology proposed by W. F. Albright (director of the American School), which serves as the basis of nomenclature in Levantine archaeology to this day. While the terminology they chose followed the technological scheme, the criteria for defining the periods were strictly historical. For example, the ‘Early Iron Age I’ was defined as being between the entry of Israelites to Canaan and the division of the kingdom after Solomon’s death. This reflects the confidence of Albright and his contemporaries not only that such events indeed happened - but that they can be unequivocally ‘read’ in the archaeological record.
The figure of Albright dominates this period. A multifaceted genius - linguist, Bible scholar, archaeologist, theologian - he was one of the leaders of intellectual fundamentalism within American evangelical protestantism. This movement was a reaction to continental pietism, which stressed the human, devotional aspect of religion and was skeptical about miracles and divine revelation. Fundamentalists advocated the unity, inerrancy, and literality of the Bible; predicating their religious belief on the literal historicity of the covenants between God and mankind. Academically, Albright waged a lifelong battle against German Old Testament source criticism. Archaeology became the linchpin of his campaign to disprove the deconstruction of the Old Testament to an anthology of competing theologies. The very name of his principle synthesis, From Stone Age to Christianity - Monotheism and the Historical Process, defines the scope of the ‘biblical archaeology’ he envisaged - maximalistic in temporal and geographic extent, if somewhat myopic in thematic scope.
It should be stressed that Albright was not a bigot - he proposed a straightforward positivistic research program into the ‘historical reality’ behind the biblical narrative. Nor was he a narrow-minded creationist or geocentrist insisting that the ‘word of God’ supersedes any evidence to the contrary. However, the ‘rules of engagement’ of his biblical archaeology were such that one may not discount the prima facie historicity of a written source unless it has irreparable inner contradictions or irremediably contradicts the ‘facts in the ground’. It was also prone to reflexive confirmation - assuming the reliability of a historical text as above, that text is utilized as a guide to the interpretation of the archaeological record - and the (thus constructed) ‘convergence’ is then used as archaeological corroboration of the historicity of the text. Albright maintained, as some of his students’ students still do, that an unbiased examination confirms the unity, antiquity, uniqueness, and almost metahistorical nature of the evolution of monotheism. Thus was created the popular image of the archaeologist ‘holding the shovel in one hand and the Bible in the other’.
Curiously enough, this ‘Albrightian program’ was embraced not only by religious Protestants, but also by secular Jewish (and to a lesser extent Arab) nationalists (both orthodox Judaism and Islam remained deeply suspicious of archaeology in any guise). The argument about ‘roots’ was central to the legitimacy debate between Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Palestine - and though the claims being made were opposing, the terms of discourse were those of ‘biblical archaeology’. A ‘Jewish Palestine Exploration Society’ (now called the ‘Israel Exploration Society’) was founded as early as 1914, and fielded its first dig in 1924. The first department of archaeology in a local academic institution was founded in the Hebrew University in 1934.
World History
