BAR Interviews Amihai Mazar—A New Generation of Israeli Archaeologists Comes of Age
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Jerusalem, April 22, 1983
Hershel Shanks: Ami, in the United States no one, or almost no one, has heard of you. You’re one of the younger generation of Israeli archaeologists. And the reason I want to talk to you about yourself and your work is because in a way you are representative of a new generation of Israeli archaeologists. You’re also special because in Israel you have the reputation of being one of the very best young Israeli archaeologists. How did it happen? How does an Israeli like you become an archaeologist?
Amihai Mazar: In my case, it was quite natural. I have been looking at excavations since I was 6 or 7. It was in the family. My father always took me to excavations. I visited the excavations of my uncle, Benjamin Mazar. I remember at the age of 15 participating for the first time in an excavation. It was at Beth She’arim with Professor [Nahman] Avigad. At that same age I worked in the Haifa Museum.
HS: You mentioned that your uncle is Benjamin Mazar, and of course he is the dean of archaeologists in Israel today and has led the excavations at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem since 1967. Did he have much influence on you?
AM: Yes, of course. We were quite close and I followed his work throughout the years. But he didn’t influence me directly to become an archaeologist, although I think through him I came to archaeology. Otherwise, perhaps I wouldn’t have thought about it. But naturally both he and my father, who is very much interested in archaeology himself and in the history of this country, led me into the field.
HS: Are you a sabra, are you a native-born Israeli?
AM: I am a sabra, born in Haifa. My parents came here in the mid-1920s from Poland.
HS: By the age of 15 had you decided to become an archaeologist?
AM: No, no. That decision was made only after my army service. When I started the university in 1963, I had to decide whether to go into biology or archaeology, and I decided on archaeology. But even after I studied archaeology and finished my B.A. degree, I still didn’t decide finally that this would be my field. It was still very vague. Only after the Six Day War in 1967 did I make a final decision. So it was a gradual process.
HS: Did they have volunteers when you began digging at the age of 15?
AM: No, not in the same way that we have now, although I was a volunteer. In the 1950s, the work was done for the most part by paid workers, especially immigrants who had no jobs. A lot of them worked in excavations. This continued, incidentally, until the early 1960s. The whole principle of working with volunteers is quite new. It started at Masada in 1963–64. Before that, it was unknown. In most archaeological work, for example at Hazor, at Beth She’arim, at Mamshit and so on, the work was done by what we call in Hebrew avodat dachak—how would you translate it into English?—kind of organized labor, paid by the government, just to supply jobs for newcomers who didn’t have jobs. This was the main manpower. Most of the workers were old people from North Africa.
HS: When did you first do your own excavation?
AM: The first time really was a Roman tomb in Caesarea in 1966.
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My first project, however, was in 1968 when I surveyed the aqueducts leading to Jerusalem. That was the first project I ever did on my own. In 1968, after the Six Day War, the Field School at Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, was looking for an archaeological project that would connect Kfar Etzion and Jerusalem. The aqueducts really physically relate these two points. The aqueducts start not far from Kfar Etzion, and they end at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. So the Field School came to me with the idea and we initiated this survey. It was a beautiful project. I remember working in the winter of ’68 surveying these aqueducts which had not been surveyed since the time of Conrad Schick in the late 19th century. We surveyed the whole system, 70 kilometers of aqueducts.
HS: Why did you survey them?
AM: We wanted to check the whole line of aqueducts to see whether Schick was exact in his descriptions, and to map the aqueducts again on modern maps. We wanted to look for all kinds of installations and details that Schick perhaps overlooked. In the end, we were surprised how exact Schick’s survey was. He was really a superb scholar. He saw almost everything. We made only minor corrections to his work.
HS: Did you think your work was a waste of time then?
AM: Not at all. With our survey, we brought these aqueducts to the attention of a broad segment of the public here in Israel, and thousands of people have since visited these aqueducts. We rediscovered some of the tunnels which were blocked and unknown until we opened them. They are now a tourist attraction—for high school kids and for the whole Israeli public.
HS: When would you date these aqueducts?
AM: To the Second Temple period. We can’t give exact dates, but we think that the oldest part of the aqueduct—that is, from the so-called Solomon’s Pools, south of Bethlehem, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—must date to the Hasmonean period, perhaps to Alexander Jannaeus [126 B.C.–76 B.C.]. We don’t have any written sources, and there is no objective archaeological data for dating them. But we base our assumption on the fact that in the Mishnah the aqueducts are referred to and are very important for ritual purposes on the Temple Mount.
HS: What do these aqueducts do?
AM: They lead water by gravitation from springs south of Jerusalem to the Temple Mount over a route 70 kilometers long.
HS: Why did they go so far away to get water?
AM: Because there are no water sources close to Jerusalem except the Gihon Spring (which is lower than the Temple Mount) and some artificial pools. In order to bring spring water to Jerusalem, you have to go several kilometers to the south, to two main groups of springs, one near Bethlehem near what we call Solomon’s Pools (they are not really Solomonic), and the other one is farther to the south, near Kfar Etzion. These two groups of springs are higher than Jerusalem, but in order to lead the water by gravitation, you have to build a channel along the contour line of the mountains. And this is a very long route. The springs near Kfar Etzion are about 25 kilometers south of Jerusalem in a direct line, but they had to be led along 70 kilometers of contours to Jerusalem. The aqueduct from Solomon’s Pools is of course the heart of the system. There are actually two aqueducts leading water to Solomon’s Pools from the south and two aqueducts leading water from Solomon’s Pools to Jerusalem. One, the Lower Aqueduct (probably dating to the Hasmonean period) leads to the Temple Mount; the other probably leads to what is now the Jaffa Gate. That one is called the Upper Aqueduct, and is probably Roman, dating to the second century A.D.
HS: So you wouldn’t date either of them to the Herodian period, to that great builder Herod the Great?
AM: Josephus [a Jewish historian of the first century A.D.] doesn’t mention an aqueduct among Herod’s building operations. If Herod had built an aqueduct, I assume Josephus would mention it; Josephus had very good sources concerning Herod’s building projects. Josephus tells us that when Herod built Herodium, he built aqueducts leading to this mountain palace-fortress. And we found this aqueduct and know it very well; it too is related to Solomon’s Pools. Josephus also tells us that Pontius Pilate, about 26 A.D., built an aqueduct to the Temple using money from the Temple treasury. This angered the Jews of his time. Josephus even gives us the length of the aqueduct built by Pontius Pilate. (Unfortunately, we have two different numbers: in Jewish Antiquities it’s 200 stadia [XVIII, III, 2 (60)] and in Jewish Wars it’s 400 stadia [II, IX, 4 (175)].) But I believe that this aqueduct built by Pontius Pilate is not the original aqueduct from Solomon’s Pools to the Temple Mount but an extension to the south; it’s hard to believe that until Pontius Pilate’s time there was no aqueduct to the Temple Mount. I think that the earliest aqueduct is pre-Herodian. Pontius Pilate probably added the southern aqueduct leading water from the Springs of Arrub near Kfar Etzion to Solomon’s Pools.
In 1968 or 1969, I wrote about this, giving my reasons for believing the Lower Aqueduct was built by the Hasmoneans. Since then, Ehud Netzer’s excavations at Jericho have shown that the Hasmoneans built very sophisticated aqueducts at Jericho leading to their palaces. So if they built such beautiful aqueducts at their palaces in Jericho, why shouldn’t we assume that in Jerusalem they built the same type of aqueduct? They had the knowledge, the technology, so I believe that my assumption is very much acceptable. But of course, I have no definite proof.
HS: Our readers hear a lot about how archaeologists can date things by the pottery they find, but in something like an aqueduct, you don’t have pottery.
AM: True. It’s very difficult. All kinds of attempts were made to date the aqueducts more precisely. For example, we investigated the technology of plaster. We can now differentiate among various types of plaster. During the Second Temple period there is a certain type of plaster which is typical in the Jerusalem area. So when you find a cistern or a channel built with this type of plaster, you can guess that it is from this period. But the time spread [when this plaster was used] is quite large. Dating by plaster is not as accurate as dating by pottery. It’s very difficult, especially with aqueducts. These aqueducts, and particularly the Lower Aqueduct, from Solomon’s Pools to the Temple Mount, were continuously in use until the late 19th century. The Lower Aqueduct was rebuilt by almost all the rulers of Jerusalem: the Romans, the Byzantines, the Mameluks, and the Ottomans. They all reused and rebuilt the same aqueduct. This of course adds to the difficulty.
HS: Did you find any of this early plaster that you could identify from the Second 048Temple period?
AM: Yes. We cut sections through the aqueduct, and in one place on the eastern slope of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, we found the earliest trace of the aqueduct. In this particular place, the Mameluks and the Ottomans had built their channel a little bit away from the original channel, and we could check the original plaster, and found it to be very much like the plaster that we have in the channels and cisterns which are firmly dated to the Second Temple period.
HS: Did you do any studies on how much water was brought to Jerusalem in this way?
AM: We have very general estimates. We know, for example, that Solomon’s Pools can hold a quarter of a million cubic meters. We know that near the Temple Mount there are cisterns, pools, and reservoirs of water surveyed by Charles Warren [in the 1860s for the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund] which would also hold about a quarter of a million cubic meters. Other cisterns and reservoirs were discovered in the 1970s in the excavations near the southern wall of the Temple Mount. So altogether about a half million cubic meters could be held at both ends. This fits, more or less, with the numbers given us by the British when they took Jerusalem in 1918 at the end of the First World War. At that time, they had a crucial problem supplying water to Jerusalem. They knew about Solomon’s Pools and the springs south of Jerusalem because of the archaeological surveys of the 19th century, so they decided to reconstruct the system, especially Solomon’s Pools. They built pumps there and used the same water sources. This was the first water project in Jerusalem after the First World War. The numbers the British gave are almost the same as I gave you—about half a million cubic meters of water could be supplied to Jerusalem from these springs south of the city.
HS: You mean that’s how much could be stored?
AM: That’s how much they could supply.
HS: Over what period of time?
AM: In about a year. We assume the water came mainly in the winter. That’s when these springs are very rich. They get almost dry in the summer. So I would assume that they would kill the reservoirs in the winter. In a good year the reservoirs on the Temple Mount and at Solomon’s Pools would store half a million cubic meters. By the end of the winter, they would have been filled and it would have to last until the next winter. They would use the stored water during the dry half of the year.
HS: You mentioned that the aqueducts had to follow the contour of the mountains. Did the builders of these aqueducts ever tunnel through instead of going around?
AM: Only in very few places. For example, the Lower Aqueduct from Solomon’s Pools to Jerusalem crossed two mountains by tunnels; each tunnel is about 400 yards long.
HS: It is shorter that way, isn’t it?
AM: Of course. One of the tunnels is in Bethlehem. The other crosses under the mountain where the United Nations had its headquarters and which served as the British High Commissioner’s palace, south of Jerusalem. A tunnel of 400 yards cuts about 3 or 4 kilometers off the length. The rock in that area of the mountain is very soft and very convenient for cutting through.
HS: Can people walk through these tunnels today?
AM: The Bethlehem tunnel is blocked. The other one, below the United Nations headquarters, can be visited. You can’t pass from one side to the other; it’s blocked in the center, but you can pass through at least a large part of it. I hear that there is some plan to open it again for the whole way.
HS: It could be cleared relatively easily, couldn’t it?
AM: Yes. In fact it was cleared by the British in 1924. I once spoke with the engineer who was in charge of the job. It could be opened.
HS: It’s a very impressive tunnel.
AM: It is a very impressive tunnel. Have you visited it?
HS: Yes. What else did you learn from your survey of the aqueducts?
AM: Well, it led me to think a little bit about the meaning of this system. I came to the conclusion that the main purpose of the whole system was to supply water to the Temple Mount, especially for the three main pilgrimage holidays—Succot (Tabernacles), Pesach (Passover), and Shavuot (Weeks)—when thousands and thousands of Jews came to Jerusalem. We can imagine these thousands of people coming to Jerusalem, increasing the population, perhaps doubling it, concentrating around the Temple Mount. They needed enormous amounts of water. Perhaps this was the main reason for building these aqueducts—to supply water to the Temple Mount for these three great festivals and of course also for the Temple rituals throughout the year.
HS: What led you to conclude that the whole system was for the Temple compound rather than for the city at large?
AM: First of all, we see that the termination of the system is at the Temple Mount. Secondly, excavations in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City showed that each of the private houses in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period had its own cistern. Private families basically relied on collecting rainwater from roofs and courtyards, which then drained into a cistern, the same system used in the Old City until quite recently. The basic water supply for private houses was the house cistern. In addition there were several large public pools in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period—like the Siloam Pool and the Bethesda Pool.
HS: How about the one that’s called Hezekiah’s Pool?
AM: Yes, of course.
HS: It was not really built by Hezekiah, was it?
AM: Of course not. It’s probably the pool Josephus calls the Pool of the Towers, which was located near the towers Herod built near the modern Jaffa Gate.
So altogether the aqueducts, the pools, and the cisterns gave Jerusalem quite a substantial water supply.
HS: How would a visitor who wanted to see the remains of these aqueducts find them?
AM: Unfortunately no signs have been posted. They should be. I hope this will he done in the future. You really need a map.
When you go to Rachel’s tomb near Bethlehem, you can see a nice part of the Roman aqueduct south of the tomb. That’s the Upper Aqueduct. It is built of stone units that together build up into a pipe. It is a second-century A.D. aqueduct built by the Tenth Roman Legion. This we know because the names of the commanders of units in the Tenth Roman Legion were found incised onto these stones. You can also see sections of this aqueduct near Solomon’s Pools. You can see a nice section of the Lower Aqueduct when you go down the steps from the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.
HS: What was the most exciting thing you’ve ever excavated?
AM: I would say the Philistine temple at Tell Qasile.
HS: That’s the only Philistine temple ever to be excavated, isn’t it?
AM: Right.
HS: Were you looking for that when you began the excavation?
AM: No. It was totally unexpected.
HS: When did you first realize you were excavating a Philistine temple?
AM: We started excavations at Tell Qasile in 1971. It was a study dig.
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HS: What do you mean by a study dig?
AM: A study dig is a dig which is intended to train first-year and second-year students in our university in the techniques of excavation.
HS: And you were the director of the dig?
AM: Yes, and after excavating some squares in the southern part of the tell, we decided to open up a new area on the northern part of the mound. I followed the contour where Philistine structures had been found in the southern part of the mound and started the new area on the same contour line. We opened three new excavation squares 5 by 5 meters each, and in one of these squares we found a very massive mudbrick wall three feet wide. Next to this wall was a burnt layer. At the bottom of the burnt layer we found a bench attached to this thick wall.
One of my staff members, Zvi Ben-Zvi, who unfortunately was killed in a car accident a few years ago, was the first to identify it. Zvi said to us, “Look, you have a temple here. A wide wall and a bench near the wall must be a temple.” Benches of course are very characteristic of temples. At first, I thought he was joking, but in the following year, 1972, we continued the excavation of this large wall and found that it was part of a temple, according to the plan of the whole building and the finds in it.
HS: What do you mean, the plan, the finds? How did you know it was a temple?
AM: First of all, you see that it’s not a private building.
HS: How do you know it’s not a private building?
AM: The thickness of the walls; the walls are about twice as thick as the walls of private buildings.
HS: Did you have Philistine homes nearby so that you could compare?
AM: Yes. We excavated one of these homes just south of the temple, and there were others excavated previously in the southern part of the mound. And the plan of the temple was totally different from any private building.
HS: How do you know it wasn’t an administrative center?
AM: Well, we reached the holy of holies. The holy of holies had something which is very characteristic of a temple, a raised platform. On this raised platform we assume that a statue of a god, probably made of wood, once stood. And all around this platform we found cult objects.
HS: What kind of cult objects?
AM: Unfortunately, only pottery cult objects. But I believe there were also some metal and perhaps wooden cult objects 055which were not preserved. The pottery cult objects are very characteristic. Some are decorated cylindrical stands. One, for example, is decorated with two figures of lionesses. Another is decorated with a procession of dancers, perhaps in a ritual dance. A third is a quite unique vase, with five holes in its upper part, probably intended for holding sacred plants. Then we found ritual bowls. They were probably used for serving the sacred meal to the god, and they were probably placed on top of the cylindrical stands. In this way meals were served to the gods.
HS: How do you know the temple is Philistine?
AM: The stratum is a Philistine stratum. In 1973 and ’74 we excavated below this temple, and we discovered two additional earlier temples. That means that we have a succession of three temples in the same place, one on top of the other, each one a little larger and more elaborate than its predecessor. The material culture revealed in these temples—the pottery, the artifacts—are characteristic of the culture found at Tell Qasile in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C. This culture is a combination of Canaanite traditions of the Late Bronze Age and Philistine traditions, very characteristic of what we call Philistine material culture. We rely especially on the famous Philistine pottery, which predominated in the temples and in the vicinity. The Philistine pottery in this case is very clear, and it is about 20 percent of the whole pottery assemblage at Tell Qasile. So I believe that, in this case, identification with either Philistines or another one of the Sea Peoples is very clear.
HS: You mentioned that there were probably metal and wooden cult objects that didn’t survive. The metal corroded and the wood deteriorated?
AM: The metal either corroded or it was plundered. We have some indication that the last temple, where we uncovered most of our finds, was plundered before it was put to fire. For example, one of our most interesting cult objects was a pottery plaque shaped like the facade of an Egyptian temple. In it there were two figures of gods or goddesses, which were broken intentionally. Someone really smashed these figures, leaving only the legs and feet.
One part of a large cult vessel was found near the holy of holies in the temple; another part of the same vessel was found smashed in the courtyard outside the building. This means that someone really broke things and threw them around before burning the temple. Perhaps more precious objects, like metal objects, were robbed and plundered.
HS: Do you know who burned the building?
AM: It’s hard to say for sure, but the pottery points to a date in the early tenth century, and it’s very logical to assume that it was King David who conquered the Philistine city. We know that David won from the Philistines an opening to the sea for his growing kingdom.
HS: How do you know that?
AM: Well, later on, all Solomon’s relations with the Phoenicians were mainly through this region. Cedar beams for the Solomonic temple in Jerusalem were brought, according to the Bible, through the Sea of Jaffa. We don’t know what this term means, the Sea of Jaffa. Is it Jaffa itself? Perhaps Tell Qasile was an important port town during this time. But anyway the Jaffa-Tel Aviv area was used by Solomon. He was not a fighter king; David was the warrior. David left it to his son Solomon to do the building. So I assume that David conquered the area, at least he took this part of the coast from the Philistines. Farther south, the Philistine cities continued to retain their autonomy throughout David’s and Solomon’s reigns. The Philistine Pentapolis [Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath] was not conquered by David or Solomon, though they conquered large areas in Transjordan, Syria and elsewhere. Only this small part of the coast was taken from the Philistines. Tell Qasile was horribly burned in the early tenth century, perhaps during these conquests.
HS: How do you know it was burned?
AM: We found a destruction layer, consisting of heavy burned debris, both in the temple and in every private house. And the pottery fits very well with an early tenth century date, to which we assign King David’s reign.
HS: I understand you found two pillars in this temple?
AM: Yes. In the third temple, the uppermost one.
HS: Naturally when people hear about pillars in a Philistine temple, they think of the Samson story. Were these pillars the sole support of the temple? If the temple didn’t have these pillars, would the roof cave in?
AM: In this temple, yes. These two pillars were very important in supporting the roof of the temple. They really carried the roof of the last Philistine temple. The earlier temples did not have such pillars. And Samson probably lived a little earlier than our last temple of the late 11th or early 10th century, although we can’t say for sure.
HS: Samson was in a different city, however. He was in Gaza.
AM: Of course.
HS: How far apart were the pillars in the temple you excavated?
AM: About two meters.
HS: Nearly six feet?
AM: Yes. A large, strong person moving from one pillar to the other, could push both of them over. However, it seems to me that in the description of the Samson story, Samson was outside the temple itself.
HS: He had to be inside the temple when he pushed the pillars out, didn’t he?
AM: Well, there was a large crowd. Temples in antiquity were not places where a large crowd assembled. The temple was the house of the god, where the god lived. He was served by the priests. But the congregation assembled outside the temple, in the courtyard. Perhaps Samson stood in a portico where there may have been two pillars.
HS: Well, in the temple you excavated the whole temple would have fallen down if you knocked out the two pillars. Isn’t that true?
AM: It’s true. If you want to interpret the temple destroyed by Samson as something similar to our Tell Qasile temple, you may, but it’s very vague.
HS: Yes. But at least in the interior of one Philistine temple, there were two pillars which were the sole support for the roof and they were spaced so that a large man could bring down the temple by pushing the pillars apart.
AM: Unquestionably, but I wouldn’t stress more than that.
HS: You’re one of the younger generation of archaeologists in Israel. Is there a generational difference between the young archaeologists that you represent and the older generation of giants like your uncle, Professor Benjamin Mazar, and Yigael Yadin, and Nahman Avigad?
AM: Well, there are differences among individuals of the older generation itself. Each has his own characteristics and they are not easily compared.
HS: Are archaeologists like, let’s say, pianists? Each pianist has a slightly different style, and the experts can hear Horowitz playing a little differently from Rubinstein?
AM: Yes. You don’t compare generations of pianists; you compare individual pianists.
HS: So you can’t identify any differences between one generation and the next?
AM: Well, there is a difference. The main difference is in the development of the art, the development of the profession. Archaeology has become different.
HS: How has it become different?
AM: The material available to the older 056generation, say 30 years ago or 40 years ago, was much more limited compared to what we have today. The activity during the last 50 years or so has been so enormous, especially during the last 20 or 30 years, that now we have much more excavated material and increasing numbers of publications. Archaeology has become really a field by itself. This was not true 40 years ago. When you think about the archaeologists of the pre-World War II period, most of them were not pure archaeologists. Many of them, both the Israelis and the Americans working in this country, like [William F.] Albright, came to archaeology through the study of Bible, theology, history. They were first of all scholars in other herds, and archaeology came to them in a kind of secondary phase of their careers. This was not true of [Yigael] Yadin and [Nahman] Avigad, but to many others, archaeology was something that accompanied their main activity, which was Bible research, history. Today when we talk about archaeologists, in Israel at least, most are pure archaeologists. Archaeology has become a field of its own, very detailed, specific and professional. This is very different from the situation 30 or 40 years ago. And this brought increasing specialization, which is the disease of all sciences now.
HS: You call it a disease. That implies that it may not be entirely a good thing. Do you have to study history and Bible and philology and languages in order to be an archaeologist, or can you just study excavation techniques?
AM: Here at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem we require students to take courses in history, languages and so on, but these courses are really background courses. The students’ principal activity is pure archaeology, ancient art and related subjects. The archaeologist’s training in history and philology is very shallow. Today, it’s very hard to become both a philologist and an archaeologist, or an Assyriologist and an archaeologist.
HS: What are the archaeological subjects? You mentioned ancient art, for example.
AM: Ancient architecture, art, metallurgy, ancient pottery development, pottery-making.
HS: So it extends far beyond excavation techniques?
AM: Of course. Excavation technique is a very important tool, but it’s just a tool.
HS: As an Israeli archaeologist, are you hampered by your inability to go to sites outside but adjacent to Israel to see the material they’re digging up?
AM: Yes. This is a big problem. I wish I could visit excavations in Jordan, for example, which are really very important, crucial for us. But we never dreamed that we would be able to visit Egypt, and now, during the last few years we have done that. All of us were eager to visit Egypt, to study its archaeology and see the Egyptian museums. It really opened a new, very wide window for us. Who knows? Perhaps sometime we will be able to visit sites in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.
HS: Among professional archaeologists, you hear a lot about the difference between the Israeli method of digging and the American method of digging. What’s the difference? Is there any?
AM: I don’t think there is an Israeli method and an American method. I think there are traditions more than methods; there are traditions of digging. Sy Gitin, the director of the Albright Institute, asked me to lecture on the Israeli method. I said there is no Israeli method. In the university, we never had a course in methodology. We have traditions. The Israeli tradition of digging is perhaps part of a general Middle Eastern tradition which emphasizes architecture. That means digging on a wide scale, uncovering whole buildings, structures, parts of towns, bringing to light the architectural unit as a whole. This was true, for example, at Hazor [an excavation led by Yigael Yadin], which is representative of Israeli archaeology in the mid-1950s. Hazor in many respects was a kind of furnace for Israeli archaeology. Many young Israeli archaeologists who are now leading professors in our universities were trained at Hazor. Then in the early ’60s, Israeli archaeology was very much influenced by the methods used by Kathleen Kenyon and others digging in Jordan. At that time we didn’t have direct access to those excavations—Jericho, Jerusalem, Shechem and others. Nonetheless we were much influenced by the British principles of studying earth layers and sections introduced at those excavations. These principles were developed by Mortimer Wheeler and Kathleen Kenyon in England and were introduced to the Middle East in the early ’50s. The first Israeli excavations carried out with a grid of squares five by five meters with balks in between were Tell Qasile (in 1959, directed by Benjamin Mazar) and Ramat Rahel in 1961 led by Yohanan Aharoni. Very quickly these new principles were integrated in Israel with the architectural concept of digging. The Israeli approach to excavation from the early 1960s until now has been to integrate these two traditions, the tradition of the architectural approach as used in most Near Eastern archaeological sites—for example, in Mesopotamia and Syria—with the British principle of emphasizing the earth layers, the balks, the sections, the squares. The integration of these two traditions created the essence of the Israeli method of digging. This is, I think, my definition of the Israeli method.
HS: You’ve told us about the essence of the Israeli method. What is the essence of the American method?
AM: The American method is harder for me to define. There are differences between various American expeditions. And there have been developments in the American approach to excavation. Take Gezer, a very prominent example. They started in 1964 and were in the field for ten years. They started with very narrow sections, just sections, and we were amazed at first how they dug these deep narrow trenches with no architectural approach at all. But during the last seasons at Gezer the architectural approach was used much more, perhaps under Israeli influence. I think that the excavators of Gezer, as well as other Americans who work in this country, also came to the conclusion that this integration is essential.
HS: If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the Israeli method and the American method are much the same.
AM: I think that they are coming together very much, and it depends very much on the individual archaeologist. You can see variations in approaches to excavations among Israeli scholars, and you can see such differences among American scholars. I don’t think that you have, really, two different methods.
HS: You mentioned Gezer, which is an interesting example. The Gezer team has now published two volumes of reports. According to the excavation director, William Dever, these two books and the excavations about which they report “are based on an altogether new approach to archaeological observation and interpretation.” Is this true, and if so, what is that new approach?
AM: I don’t know what he means. He may refer to various things introduced at Gezer, but I think that some of them were also introduced in Israeli archaeology, like cooperation with various fields of research—geology, osteology (bone analysis), and botanic research, for example. All this has been integrated with archaeological work. 060Perhaps he refers to the very meticulous definition of earth layers, the attribution of pottery to these different earth layers, which was very important at Gezer, as it was at other American expeditions, like Shechem. This is very characteristic of the American tradition. Perhaps this is what he means. Otherwise, I don’t know. These were the two characteristics of the Gezer expedition: an emphasis on the investigation of earth layers and their contents, and the integration of other herds of research with the archaeological work there.
HS: Has that occurred in Israeli archaeology?
AM: As to the second part, I would say yes, especially during the last ten years. It’s very well developed; we have geologists, botanists, anthropologists and so on integrated into archaeological research everywhere.
HS: Dever talks about the “unfortunate persistence of the architectural over the stratigraphic orientation” of the Israelis. Do you see that in Israeli archaeology?
AM: During the early years of Israeli archaeology, yes. More recently, at least in the better excavations—and there are always good excavations and bad excavations in Israel, in America, everywhere—in Israel today the better excavations emphasize the stratigraphic perspective just as much as the architectural perspective.
HS: As you know, there is a dispute about nomenclature going on in the archaeological world today, about whether there is a field of archaeology called Biblical archaeology, whether it’s really an academic discipline or whether it should be called something else like Palestinian archaeology, or Syro-Palestinian archaeology. Recently there have been charges that those archaeologists who were Biblically oriented were resisting the new techniques, new methods, the new ideas on how to extract as much as possible from what’s being dug up. Is it your experience that this is true, that those archaeologists who are Biblically oriented resist change?
AM: I don’t think that’s true at all. I wish those who make those charges would cite some examples.
I don’t understand this dispute. There is a discussion of nomenclature—what to call our field. Is it Biblical archaeology, is it Syro-Palestinian archaeology, is it archaeology of the Levant? What is it? I think Biblical archaeology is still a good term. Biblical archaeology involves all aspects of archaeological research that have anything to do with the Bible. This means, in fact, ancient Near Eastern archaeology. And this is exactly what we are doing. In Israel we study ancient Near Eastern archaeology in general. We cannot get into details of Mesopotamian archaeology, but we study the principles of Mesopotamian archaeology—architecture, art and so on—and we are interested in every aspect of ancient Near Eastern archaeology related to the Bible. We study Hittite culture, Sumerian culture, Assyrian culture and so on. We see the Bible as the most important written source for our archaeological research. I think in every area of the world, archaeology is related to historical texts. The Bible is for us the most important document, the most important written source. We must relate our finds to the Bible. This is Biblical archaeology.
HS: What’s behind this movement to eliminate Biblical archaeology?
AM: I don’t know. You have to ask those people who are against it. I can’t understand it. By the way, many of them write excellent papers which are pure Biblical archaeology, 061for example, relating various finds to the description of the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem. Isn’t that Biblical archaeology? The paper I refer to was written by Bill Dever, the leader of the movement against the term Biblical archaeology. When Dever studies the high place at Gezer, doesn’t he relate it to high places in the Bible? Of course he does. So I think those people who are against Biblical archaeology really do Biblical archaeology anyway. Why they are against the term, I don’t know. I don’t have an explanation.
HS: I doubt that you have a crystal ball, Ami, but do you have any thoughts about what Biblical archaeology is going to be like in 10 or 20 or 50 years? What directions is it taking? How will it change?
AM: It’s very hard to say. But I can see some tendencies in recent years which may point the direction. First of all, I see in Israel a strong tendency to regional archaeological research, relying not only on excavations but also on field surveys. The surveys that have been done in Israel during the last few years are fabulous. All over the country young students, most of them younger than I, are doing a wonderful job in the Negev, in Judea, in Samaria, in the Golan.
HS: What are they learning from these surveys?
AM: Surveys open up a completely new world. We look at archaeological problems from a new perspective. Take, for example, problems of Canaanite culture or the Israelite kingdom of Judah. We study not only the stratigraphy and the sequence of pottery, we also study the pattern of settlement, the spread of population, the spread of sites, the intensity of sites, the agricultural background of life at the time. We ask what was the economic basis for life during the period, what were the water sources. These are new horizons, which were never explored systematically before, and now we are surveying these areas very intensively.
HS: You can learn all this from surveys, on the surface, without excavations?
AM: Yes, we can learn very much from these surface surveys, together with minor excavations. We usually talk about the large excavations of cities, but a lot can also be learned from minor excavations. I did three or four recently which provided information that could not be gotten from excavations on the major mounds.
HS: What do you mean by a minor excavation?
AM: A small excavation which may take five or six days. Just last year I did such an excavation in the Judean Desert. In five days we revealed a building of the Late Iron Age, an isolated building in the middle of the desert on the main road connecting Jericho with Bethel. Perhaps it was a royal fortress, perhaps a kind of a khan, a way station on the road. It shows us a new aspect of life of that period which we cannot learn about from excavations on the main tells.
HS: This wasn’t a tell at all?
AM: No, no. It was just a ruin.
HS: How did you know it was there?
AM: It was discovered by a friend of mine, Zvi Ilan, who surveyed the road. He was interested in the road itself.
HS: Could you tell it was an Iron Age building before excavating?
AM: Yes, from the pottery on the surface.
HS: I’ve heard some archaeologists say that you really can’t tell what’s under the ground from what’s on top of it. Until you excavate, you really don’t know. What do you think about that?
AM: Well, this brings us back to the question of surveys. Surveys are of course limited in the amount of information they can supply, but they give us a general idea of what is going on. A thorough survey of a region can give us more or less an outline of the history of settlement in the region, without putting a spade in the earth—if the sherds are collected well and if the survey is done in a thorough way. And this can be supplemented by minor excavations after the survey to add to and check the results. In the Negev, for example, the Israel Survey has surveyed hundreds of square kilometers. They registered thousands of sites, and following this survey, there were excavations in many of these small sites—Israelite citadels, Middle Bronze Age sites, Nabatean sites. Now the history of the Negev is much better known. I think the combination of a survey with small excavations gives us a new perspective which we must add to what we know from the major sites.
HS: Is there anything else in the bigger picture that’s likely to change?
AM: There’s the problem of the amount of archaeological activity. In the past we had what you called the giants, but just a few of them. We are coming to a period where we have many archaeologists in Israel. We now have in Israel about 200 active archaeologists. And there will be more.
HS: You certainly will have a burgeoning of information and material, won’t you?
AM: No question.
HS: Do you think there will be a problem digesting the vast amounts of new information and material?
AM: Yes. This is a crucial problem. Another crucial problem is the problem of publication. We are much, much behind in publication, and this is one of the most serious problems not only of Israeli archaeologists but of all archaeologists all over the world.
HS: This is a real embarrassment in Israel.
AM: It’s an embarrassment everywhere, not only in Israel. Everywhere, with whomever you speak, archaeologists are always far behind in publication.
HS: Is this a problem which is being neglected, or is it being faced by the archaeological community?
AM: People don’t talk about it too much, yet it’s a big problem. We try to do our best, at least I try to do my best, but it’s not easy.
HS: You happen to be one of the people who do publish.
AM: Well, I try, but still I am behind. It’s a long, tiring process preparing an archaeological publication.
HS: You agree that publication is crucial, however?
AM: It is, no question. In almost any subject you want to study today, you must deal with the fact that about 80 percent or more of the material you want to study is not available in published form. It’s a big problem. You always face this problem; a large amount of the material is unpublished.
HS: You said that it’s not talked about much. Is it something that should be talked about more?
AM: It should be. It should be discussed. I think we, the younger generation, who have all kinds of new tools like the computer, like new printing methods that do things cheaper and faster, like microfiche for publication of raw material—we should use these new tools. They should be introduced here. We no longer have to publish these big thick expensive volumes. We can reduce them to microfiche cards where the raw material will be available for the specialist.
HS: It’s been said that archaeologists destroy, and once you dig a site, the evidence is gone. You only have it once.
AM: Yes, it’s totally true.
HS: And if you don’t publish it, you’re destroying it.
AM: Destroyed forever.
HS: Do you have any advice for the young student who doesn’t want to become a professional archaeologist but would like to learn more about the subject?
AM: Read BAR. All the information is there.
HS: I think on that note we can stop. Ami, thank you very much.
Jerusalem, April 22, 1983
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