Dever Stars at Lackluster Annual Meeting

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Let’s come out with it at the beginning. The archaeological presentations at the Annual Meeting^a were, by and large, lackluster. There were notable exceptions, of course (some of which will be mentioned anon), but for the most part it was like counting grains of sand on some ancient beach.

One person obviously cannot attend more than a small fraction of the hundreds of presentations at the yearly bash, but our judgment of the overall effect seemed to be widely shared by the many people we talked to. Among them was Joe Seger of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University and director of the excavation at Tell Halif in Israel, who suggested that perhaps the dullness was because less was coming out of the ground, or perhaps because archaeologists were recently engaging in more specialized studies.

Barry Gittlen of Baltimore Hebrew University, the new archaeological program chairman, claims he has many new ideas in the works, but is not yet prepared to announce them. One innovation he was willing to discuss was an increased emphasis on program units planned around a theme. Examples at this year’s meeting were a session concerning the emergence of the Phoenicians and another dealing with the pig in Palestine.

On the surface, the theme idea is attractive. But success depends on its execution. This year’s “experiments” succeeded only partially. The subjects must be broad enough and of sufficiently wide interest to sustain a lengthy session of two or three hours. That part, however, is easy. The hard part is to find people who will prepare papers that synthesize major areas of the topic. It is much easier to get people to give papers on subjects they’ve already been thinking about than to persuade them to think about a topic assigned to them. Too often, people who are asked to participate either choose very narrow aspects of the theme or fail to prepare a proper synthetic treatment.

We also missed a “country” theme this year. In the past, major sessions were devoted to a particular country, Syria one year, Jordan another, Cyprus and Israel in still other years. This is important not only for its intrinsic interest but also because it provides an occasion to bring foreign archaeologists to this country to interact with American archaeologists. The Israelis always send a significant contingent to the Annual Meeting, but Israel is unique in this respect. This year, so far as I was able to tell, not a single Arab archaeologist attended the Annual Meeting, let alone presented an archaeological paper on what was happening in his or her country. This should be changed. Money must be found to bring Arab archaeologists to the Annual Meeting.

In addition, major voices among American archaeologists were silent this year. Although they attended the Annual Meeting, we did not hear from Larry Stager on Ashkelon, Sy Gitin on Tel Miqne/Ekron or Eric Meyers on Sepphoris. We also missed some major Israeli archaeologists who sometimes attend, but who were absent this year—Trude Dothan, David Ussishkin, Gaby Barkay, Ephraim Stern and Ami Mazar, to name a few. Eliezer Oren and Amnon Ben-Tor did attend, but they didn’t talk about their own excavations.

Jim Sauer, ASOR’s ex-president, now relieved of the burdens of office, also attended, but failed to give a paper.

Which brings up another subject. This year saw a changing of the guard at ASOR. Kyle McCarter, who holds the Albright chair at Johns Hopkins University, succeeded Sauer at the 053ASOR helm. Widely admired and respected for his Biblical scholarship as well as for his irenic personality, McCarter brings badly needed skills to this troubled organization. (Last year’s deficit, it is reported, ate up nearly one-third of the ASOR endowment.) McCarter’s upbeat presentations concerning ASOR’s condition were probably what was needed, but they only partially allayed fears for ASOR’s future. However, this is only the beginning of McCarter’s tenure, and the support he enjoys from all segments of the ASOR community should serve him well—if only the bickering would come to an end.

Ironically, the star of this year’s Annual Meeting was the man who badly wanted the ASOR presidency but was denied it, Bill Dever. Dever served for four years as director of ASOR’s Jerusalem School; he headed one of the largest and most important ASOR-sponsored digs—at Tel Gezer; he chaired ASOR’s Committee on Archaeological Policy; he edited ASOR’s professional journal, the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research; and for six years he served as vice president of ASOR. In short, he has devoted much of his professional life to ASOR.

But Dever is also divisive and polemical. No one would nominate him for Secretary of State; a diplomat he is not. Clearly, he was not the man ASOR needed as president after six years of harrowing turmoil and mismanagement.

Dever is, however, one thing above all else: He is a great scholar. He displays imagination and creativity. He commands a vast quantity of archaeological knowledge—methodological, practical, theoretical and substantive. He thinks broadly and incisively. And he expresses himself articulately and powerfully, with grace and even with humor. When Dever speaks, you know you are in the presence of a major scholar. Despite his well-known aversion to the term “Biblical archaeology,” he is one of the field’s foremost and best-qualified practitioners.

Perhaps this is one reason why the archaeological sessions seemed so lackluster: Dever gave the first presentation at the Annual Meeting. Everything—or almost everything—afterward paled by comparison.

Dever spoke on a deceptively simple subject: The tell, those artificial mounds that contain buried cities and dot the Near East. From the subject, one might have thought that Dever intended to address the opening class of an introductory course for undergraduates. But Dever didn’t talk about how a tell was created layer by layer, city upon city, or how it should be excavated and dated, stratum by stratum, locus by locus. His subject was the tell itself as a cultural artifact.

The predicate of his analysis is that “most of the tell’s sedimentary matrix is culturally derived.” He seeks to create a typology of tells emphasizing settlement types, regional groupings of tells that will reveal settlement patterns, and the comparative history of tell settlement over the centuries or millennia. He hopes this typology will enable him to investigate cultural processes at work in these variations. Dever wants to study tells “as functioning components within a larger cultural system.”

Dever notes that tells vary in many ways. Some are large, some small; some permanent, some uninhabited for long periods. Tells also differ in geographical setting, socioeconomic organization, political structure, defense requirements, and technology. Archaeologists are now in a position to characterize and describe tells in this way; they should take the next step and try to understand cultural development in light of these variations. Dever suggests that we can now discover even “ideology, including religion” from the archaeological record. And we can use all of this data to examine processes of cultural change.

First, “we must look at each tell in its totality,” Dever says, “and over the trajectory of its entire history, each as a unique cultural expression.” Then we must do the same for regional groupings of tells. Finally, as we expand in space, we must also expand in time, in order to give a completely “macroscopic” view. When we do this we might find, for example, that the Moslem conquest of Palestine in the seventh century elucidates the Israelite settlement 2,000 years earlier.

In the end, Dever wants to move toward a “true cultural history of Palestine.” He observes that “as yet, 054nothing even approaching [this], scarcely even a synthetic treatment of a single period” has been created.

But archaeology should go in this direction, Dever says. Already, “archaeology today is outgrowing the sterile, ‘scientific’ pretensions of the new archaeology of the 1970s and early 1980s.” We must once again “conceive of archaeology as history, but history in the broadest, deepest, best sense—the reconstruction of the past as the integration of socioeconomic, political and religious history, of material culture, texts and ideology, and with a new, frankly humanistic concern for the past as our past.”

Dever was also at the center of what may have been the second most exciting session at the Annual Meeting—a session on Egypt and Canaan that brought Dever face to face with Manfred Bietak, of the University of Vienna and the Austrian Archaeological Institute. Beitak is one of the world’s leading Egyptologists and the director of the excavations at Tell el-Daba in the eastern Nile Delta. Tell el-Daba may well be the most important Bible-related site under excavation in Egypt. Dever and Bietak disagree by between 100 and 150 years on the dating of the Middle Bronze Age II. Bietak dates this period from about 1700 to 1500–1450 B.C. Dever and other archaeologists working in Israel place the end of the Middle Bronze Age about 1550 B.C. The end of the Middle Bronze Age also marks the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, the period immediately preceding the Israelite emergence in Canaan, so the debate has considerable significance for reconstructing the early history of Israel and the conditions under which Israel strode onto the historical scene.

One problem with face-to-face debates such as the one between Dever and Bietak is that the speakers often talk past each other, without directly addressing the other’s contentions. Unfortunately, that was the case in much of this confrontation. Moreover, the subject’s complexity makes it difficult to discuss the matter before a large audience. A stronger moderator, however, could have summarized each side and forced them to focus more precisely on the issues that divided them. After the session ended at about 11 in the evening, a small group continued the debate, which helped to refine or define the issues. All agreed that the chronology of the Middle Bronze Age in Canaan must be determined by synchronisms with Egyptian chronology. All agreed that the absolute dates of Pharaonic chronology are fixed within about ten years. Therefore, the basic issue is whether Bietak has correctly fit three strata of pottery from Tell el-Daba into Egyptian chronology. Unfortunately, Bietak’s pottery is still unpublished. Moreover, say those who support Dever, we must also look at synchronisms with Mesopotamian chronology, which, like Egyptian chronology, also provides absolute dates. The relative dating evidence from Canaan also somehow bears on the outcome of the debate. Although few people may have been aware of this debate before Chicago, it will now move to the forefront of the discussion, probably for years to come.^b Perhaps its technical aspects can be made more understandable in the future.

Dever was by no means the only star in the Chicago firmament, despite an overall lackluster program. Phil King’s address as president of the Society of Biblical Literature fairly sparkled. He creatively brought together the various unique aspects of the eighth century B.C. to ask whether this was the greatest of centuries. An adapted version of his talk is scheduled to appear in a future issue of Bible Review, BAR’s sister magazine.

Bryant Wood of Associates for Biblical Research provided an exciting new analysis of Philistine origins in Canaan, which will eventually appear as an article in BAR.

Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem spoke about the metal industry at Dan; and Vassilios Tzaferis of the Israel Department of Antiquities described his exciting new excavations at Capernaum. And there was much, much more.

On the Society of Biblical Literature program, our cup runneth over. Interest in the sessions on the historical Jesus was so great that as many people had to sit or stand in the hall as could get into the room. Major scholars such as Ed Sanders from Oxford, Marcus Borg of Oregon State University and Burton Mack of Claremont Graduate School in California discussed and defended their recent books on the historical Jesus in the light of analyses by capable panelists. In another session, Peter Machinist of the University of Michigan gave a gem of an analysis of the tiny but difficult book of the prophet Nahum. The list could go on and on.

The Hilton Hotel in Chicago seemed to handle the crowd well—no mean feat, considering that over 5,000 people attended this largest-ever Annual Meeting. Unfortunately, a throbbing band with a heavy drum section performed just outside the hall while the Capernaum sessions were held. As one speaker remarked, this was the first scholarly talk he had given to musical accompaniment.

One small but important suggestion: The program book (now the size of a small telephone book) should contain an alphabetical list of the names of the rooms where sessions are held and the floor on which the rooms are located. When racing from session to session, it is frustrating to have to hunt through six floor plans, for example, looking for the Lake Erie Room, only to find that it is on the eighth floor, for which no floor plan was provided in the program book. As a result I missed a good bit of the Mitchell Dahood Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by Mark Smith of Yale University.

But despite all the kvetching and complaining, the Annual Meeting was, as always, an exhilarating madhouse—definitely not to be missed! See you next year in Anaheim.

Let’s come out with it at the beginning. The archaeological presentations at the Annual Meetinga were, by and large, lackluster. There were notable exceptions, of course (some of which will be mentioned anon), but for the most part it was like counting grains of sand on some ancient beach. One person obviously cannot attend more than a small fraction of the hundreds of presentations at the yearly bash, but our judgment of the overall effect seemed to be widely shared by the many people we talked to. Among them was Joe Seger of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at […]