How Mute Stones Speak: Interpreting What We Dig Up

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The common romantic image of the archaeologist—a discoverer clearing his way through the jungle to explore ruined cities and temples or crawling into mysterious tombs full of ancient gold and spells—belies reality, of course. Modern archaeology is about interpretation as much as discovery. True, the archaeologist’s prime tasks are excavation and collection of facts about the human past. But these facts are mute; they do not speak for themselves; they must be interpreted. Only through interpretation is meaning assigned to the archaeological finds. Without interpretation, archaeology is no more than treasure hunting.

Even trivial, routine archaeological statements like “this pottery vessel is a cooking pot” implicitly include a process of interpretation; we interpret a vessel as a cooking-pot because of the shape of the vessel, or soot-marks, or provenance, or ethnographic analogies, or all of the above.

It is a truism that we cannot observe the past directly. Even the most exciting archaeological finds are only static material remains of a once dynamic sociopolitical and cultural system—“the bric-a-brac washed up on the shore of modern times and left there as the social currents within which it was created have drained away.”¹

The archaeologist must decode the silent material configurations he excavates and translate them into meaningful statements about the dynamics of long-gone ways of life and the conditions that brought into being the detritus that has survived.²

Only since the 1960s and early 1970s has serious consideration been given to the nature of archaeological interpretation. At that time we began to see a sustained critique of the prevailing simplistic view of the archaeological record as self-evident. This new critique traveled under the name of the “New Archaeology.” “New Archaeology” offered an alternative to the traditional, supposedly self-evident principle of interpretation that had been based largely on professional authority. This new alternative relied instead on ethnoarchaeological investigations—the study of material culture correlates of behavior in contemporary native societies. Ethnoarchaeological investigations of such societies provided a way to observe and study the relationship between statics (that is, material remains) and dynamics (that is, behavior).

Another strand of development in archaeological theory occurred at this same time. Some scholars claimed that all archaeological inferences, whatever their source, should be accepted only if validated scientifically, just as supposedly occurs in the natural sciences; that is, archaeology should proceed by the examination of hypotheses through deductive reasoning and evaluation of explanations by their correspondence to universal cultural laws.³

More recent developments in archaeological theory, however, reject this positivist philosophy of science, based as it is on the supposition that material culture (as excavated by the archaeologist) merely reflects behavior. Indeed, it can be a reflection of much more—of ideas, of beliefs and meanings, of attitudes to space, to dirt, to death, etc.

A historically oriented, contextual approach to the archaeological record is therefore advocated, emphasizing the role of symbols and ideology in culture and its material manifestations.⁴

A more radical relativistic theory of archaeological interpretation denies the very possibility of objective scientific research. All archaeological inferences, claim the proponents of this approach, are subject to the researcher’s worldview and are determined by contemporary social, economic, political and ideological factors. This relativistic viewpoint, an offshoot of intellectual trends such as neo-Marxist critical theory and post-modern deconstruction theory, holds that we can never create a “true” record of “what actually happened.” Different people inevitably write different accounts of the past.⁵

Granted, all archaeology is written by people in given cultural and historical circumstances. Nevertheless, this need not open the floodgates to total relativism. Archaeological interpretation can be scrutinized not only for its correspondence to the hard archaeological data but also to expose the values a particular interpretation embodies.⁶

How did these ideas influence interpretation in Biblical archaeology?

Biblical archaeology, as traditionally practiced, had a great advantage over other branches of archaeology: Biblical archaeology possessed an invaluable “Rosetta Stone” for interpreting the archaeological record—the Bible. The material remains from excavated tells in the “Land of the Bible” were usually “read” as direct reflections of the political and cultural history contained in the Bible—the deeds of kings, the result of military campaigns, or the product of certain ethnic groups, all corresponding to Biblical narratives. As a result, Biblical archaeology for most of the past 150 years was an extremely pragmatic archaeology, interested more in field methodology than in questions of interpretation.

This impression, however, is only part of the story. Underlying the pragmatic attitude of most Biblical archaeologists, we can discern several idiosyncratic frameworks of interpretation. An examination of these frameworks of interpretation allows us to recognize the subjective element in Biblical archaeology (as in other “archaeologies”) and brings us to a more sober and critical attitude toward traditional explanations of the archaeological record.

A continuing methodological revolution has transformed Biblical archaeology “from one man riding on 060a donkey identifying ancient sites to today’s application of computer technology, statistical methods, paleoethnobotany and anthropology.”⁷ True, but even this presents us with only a partial perspective of the history of interpretation in Biblical archaeology. A complementary history of the divergent intellectual roots, worldviews and personal prejudices that lie behind both methodology and interpretation in Biblical archaeology is emerging. And it is this that we shall explore.⁸

Archaeologists working in Palestine between the end of the 19th century and the First World War are generally regarded as the “Founding Fathers” of Biblical archaeology. It was they who made the break away from antiquarianism and superstition; it was they who established a modern, scientific archaeology. This is the conventional wisdom—and it is true as far as it concerns the vast improvements in field techniques introduced at the turn of the century by professional archaeologists such as Sir Flinders Petrie at Tell el-Hesi and George A. Reisner at Samaria.⁹ Their contributions are less convincing, however, when it comes to interpreting the archaeological record, as becomes clear when we examine their intellectual roots.¹⁰

Less well known than Petrie’s introduction of stratigraphy and artifact typology to the archaeology of Palestine is his commitment to a racial theory of eugenics, which unfortunately influenced his interpretation of the successive stratigraphical and pottery changes at Tell el-Hesi. In addition to distinguishing stratigraphic layers, Petrie also distinguished several periods of racial domination by successively abler races who conquered and colonized exhausted, racially different societies. He identified successive cycles of rise-florescence-decay in the creative vigor of conquering races and attributed their decline to inevitable interbreeding with their subjects.

Racist ideas, in the guise of an imperialistic worldview legitimizing the domination of chosen races over stagnant ones and justifying an East/West racial conflict, were also at the root of the interpretative framework employed by the Irish archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister, the pioneer excavator of Tel Gezer. According to Macalister, “The Semitic natives, Amorite, Hebrew, or Arab, never invented anything: they assimilated all the elements of their civilization from without. This principle is the key to the interpretation of all remains of antiquity found in the land of Palestine.”¹¹ Against a background of millennia of alleged cultural stagnation, the past was conceived as a direct reflection of the wretched present. Thus, the ancient city of Gezer was envisaged as a reproduction of a contemporary Arab village with all its maladies: crooked, unclean streets infested with insects and evil-looking children, poor mud houses, unhealthy people and hungry dogs.

For Macalister, even the ubiquitous sheikhs’ tombs dotting the landscape of Palestine seemed to carry on the tradition of primitive Semitic hilltop shrines.¹² Since “from first to last there was not a native potter in Palestine who could so much as invent a new design to paint on his waterpots…(neither) an armourer who could invent a new pattern of sword or arrowhead,” Macalister was sure that oriental Canaan had to wait for the first Westerners to arrive, bringing with them “the artistic instincts of their race…superior to anything that was to be met with among the works…of the native Semitic craftsmen of the country.” These 061cultural saviors were the Philistines, fleeing the collapsing high civilization of Crete, and destined to become “the only cultured or artistic race who ever occupied the soil of Palestine.” According to such interpretative conceptions, the massive building projects and the rich material culture from the time of the Hebrew monarchy were the products of foreign masons and artists, a “crude and feeble degradation” of Aegean and Egyptian prototypes. Even the famous Siloam tunnel^a was considered a “pathetically helpless piece of engineering” due to its random windings, which could have been avoided if an Egyptian engineer had been in charge of its construction.¹³

A vivid expression of the ethnocentric prejudices that bedeviled Palestinian archaeology in its early days is also reflected in the terminology used for chronological and cultural classification: Amorites, Canaanites, Israelites, Phoenicians, Jews and Semites all gave their names to various strata in the tells.¹⁴ Pre-Semitic Rephaim or Anakim (Numbers 13:33; Deuteronomy 2:11, 3:11, 9:2) were postulated as the original excavators of the caves of the Shephelah, the low foothills between the central hill country of southern Palestine and the coastal plain on the Mediterranean shore.¹⁵ Though such terminology surely satisfied many of those in search of Biblical remains, it was clearly at odds with the neutral nomenclature of contemporaneous Europe and its “Three Ages”—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

Anti-Semitism and racial myths provided a still different ideological context of interpretation at the beginning of the century. Ernst Sellin, another “Founding Father” who excavated at Taanach with field methods primitive even by the standards of his time, interpreted cultic artifacts as proving the authenticity and historicity of cult practices condemned by the Israelite prophets. Determined to counter attacks on the Bible from other quarters, Sellin used his archaeological finds primarily to oppose German Higher Criticism, with its analysis of different authorial strands in the Pentateuch, and to disprove the alleged non-Semitic, Babylonian sources for Israelite faith.¹⁶ Because of its associated denigration of Israelite religion and society, this so-called Higher Criticism has sometimes been referred to as the Higher Anti-Semitism. In Frederic Delitzsch’s Babel und Bibel, all that was really valuable in Israelite culture was attributed to Babylon and the east. Delitzsch’s theories were the source of a religious bias that unfortunately led not only Sellin but other early workers in the archaeology of Palestine to incorrect interpretations. To name only one, they regarded the pillars in Israelite buildings as Iron Age cultic monoliths (masseboth) instead of mere structural supports.Magen Broshi, “Religion, Ideology, and Politics and their Impact on Palestinian Archaeology,” ¹⁷

The “Golden Age” of Palestinian archaeology—the period between the two World Wars—was dominated by American-style “Biblical archaeology” as championed by William Foxwell Albright and his disciples. The intellectual grounding of this powerful school continued to cast its shadow over the archaeology of Palestine up to the early 1970s (especially through the highly influential work of Albright’s foremost student, G. Ernest Wright). The Albright school was rooted in late-19th- and early-20th-century American religious life; its agenda was more akin to contemporaneous theological polemics than to archaeology. The leaders of the school, as well as most of its second generation proponents, were almost exclusively Protestant Old Testament scholars and clerics trying to establish the essential historicity of the Biblical narratives, particularly those of the Patriarchal Age and the conquest of the Promised Land.¹⁸

Albright saw himself as an Orientalist; Biblical 062archaeology was simply a subdiscipline of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and especially of Biblical studies.¹⁹ The archaeologist’s main task was to provide new objective facts that would disprove the theoretical speculation of the “higher” Biblical criticism of the Wellhausen School in Germany, which had undermined much of the history portrayed in the Pentateuch. Archaeological “external evidence” was therefore needed to authenticate Israel’s earliest traditions, to explain how the Israelites established themselves in Canaan and to place Israel in its proper place within the ideological history of the ancient Near East.

Albright virtually revolutionized the archaeology of Palestine, introducing structure and coherence where anarchy and chaos had previously prevailed. Refinements in stratigraphy, pottery typology and the chronology of ancient Palestine, as well as the establishment of the area’s cultural sequence, were not regarded as goals for their own sakes. Rather, they were pragmatic tools to achieve an overall historical framework of interpretation, integrating artifacts with Biblical and extra-Biblical texts. Albright was well aware that archaeological evidence is at times equivocal and that Biblical narratives are not always all they seem; nevertheless he, as well as many of his followers in succeeding generations, considered both archaeology and the Bible as essentially trustworthy sources of historical information. This optimistic but naive belief (resting on empiricist and conservative foundations) soon led to a narrow interpretative framework that relied exclusively on Biblical history and theology. A vicious circle of reasoning was unavoidable: “If an archaeologist accepts uncritically the biblical evidence as a principle of explanation of archaeological finds, dates those finds from the biblical ‘evidence,’ or provides dates for the biblical events having first used such ‘evidence’ for identification and explanation of archaeological features, it becomes utterly impossible after a while to unravel the arguments, to see what is concluded from which evidence, or to find out how much of it is based on a circular reason.”²⁰

Numerous simplistic and uncritical interpretations of archaeological observations were proposed in the heyday of American Biblical archaeology as answers to complex Biblical questions. For example, when Nelson Glueck’s pioneer surface surveys in Transjordan revealed a steep reduction in settlements in the late third millennium B.C.E., Glueck unhesitatingly “explained” this as the result of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as recorded in Genesis 13–19. Later fluctuations in settlement patterns in the same region were attributed without reservation to events related in the Exodus and Conquest narratives.²¹

The same interpretative methodology lay behind Glueck’s excavations at Tell el-Kheleifeh. He interpreted the site as a Solomonic metalworking center, relying more on Bible-based preconceptions than on careful analysis of the archaeological data, as a recent critical study has shown.²²

In an even more extreme case, James Kelso inextricably mixed description and interpretation in his excavation report on Bethel; preconception became confirmation of interpretation. Thus, he connected Bethel (“house of El”) with the patriarchal religion of Biblical tradition; he then misinterpreted archaeological remains from various periods, mixing facts and fancy. A few flintstones, some cup-marks and a standing fieldstone easily became “an open air sacrificial shrine to the Canaanite god El,” “Abraham’s altar” and a masseboth (standing stone)!²³

Today, it is clear that Albright’s lifelong effort to demonstrate the historicity of the Patriarchal and Israelite Conquest narratives, as well as his effort to demonstrate the uniqueness of Israel’s cult, was doomed to failure, resulting from the same deficient interpretative preconceptions that used both archaeology and Biblical studies as “proof-texts” for historical and theological propositions. Although archaeology has 063documented a Genesis-like pastoral nomadic life all over the ancient Near East, archaeology has been unable to uncover any direct evidence to authenticate a “Patriarchal era.” [Compare the article by Kenneth Kitchen, “The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?” in this issue.—Ed.]

The same is true for the other basic issue on the agenda of the Albright School—Moses and monotheism: Archaeologically speaking, nothing can be said about Moses, Israel’s presence in Egypt or the Exodus. Nor can archaeology provide any very profound insights concerning the origins of Israelite monotheism. Recent archaeological research has shown that Israel’s cult was not unique, was anything but monotheistic and was indeed syncretistic from start to finish.²⁴

As for the Israelite settlement in Canaan, only a small number of archaeologists still adhere to the “Conquest model,” derived principally from the Book of Joshua and promoted by Albrightian Biblical archaeology.

Alongside this theologically conservative strain of American-style Biblical archaeology was a minor secular tributary, represented by Reisner’s excavations at Samaria, the British excavations at Lachish and the pre-World War II American projects at Beth-Shean and Megiddo. This much-less-influential group was reinforced in the 1950s by the work of the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon and the emerging “Israeli School” of Palestinian archaeology. Paradoxically, despite its secular perspective, even this group subscribed to the interpretative preconceptions used by the Albright school.

Kenyon’s principal impact on Palestinian archaeology was in field methodology. She has aptly been called the “mistress of technique in digging.” Her celebrated stratigraphical method (the so-called Wheeler-Kenyon method, or “balk/debris layer” method) focused on the observation and recording of soil layers. However, this somewhat mechanical undertaking was not accompanied by an adequate interpretative awareness of what modern archaeology now calls “site formation processes,” namely, the cultural and natural activities that formed the depositional features, which alone would be capable of explaining her carefully excavated layers.²⁵ Moreover, relying almost exclusively on stratigraphical and pottery analyses, mainly from her own limited excavations, Kenyon’s reconstructions of the cultural history of ancient Palestine serve as examples of the defective model for explaining cultural change that reigned over Palestinian archaeology from its earliest days until recent decades. This “normative” model is based on the idea that culture is a collection of mental templates or norms reflected in recurrent assemblages of artifacts. Pots were identified with peoples; cultural change was invariably interpreted as the result of conquest and migration.²⁶ Neither Kenyon nor her 064compatriots in the secular stream of Palestinian archaeology were willing to break free from the Biblical framework of interpretation. Thus, for example, the excavators of Megiddo facilely identified a “Solomonic” gate and stables, which are still the subject of major stratigraphical, historical and functional debate.²⁷ Similarly, Kenyon’s analysis of the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine was accompanied by a naive and uncritical correlation of the archaeological remains with narratives concerning Amorites and Canaanites as described in Numbers and Joshua.²⁸

The “Israeli School” of archaeology that developed after the establishment of the State in 1948 did not differ from contemporaneous schools of Palestinian archaeology, adopting both the normative model of culture and the Bible as an interpretative framework, even though Israeli archaeologists did so in a secular mode—secular in the sense that the objectives of research were historical rather than theological. Since in Israel the Bible is universally accepted as the founding document of the nation’s history, archaeology played (and continues to play) an important role in affirming the links of the newly founded nation with its ancient past and its ancestral land. Israeli “Biblical archaeology” is therefore a nonreligious academic enterprise, with direct existential and emotional ties to the Bible.²⁹

Undoubtedly, the prototypical Israeli Biblical archaeologist was Yigael Yadin.^b30 A “secular fundamentalist” (a term coined by William Dever) throughout his rich and diversified archaeological career, he repeatedly focused on the same issues that were the long-lasting interests of the Albright school—the Israelite conquest of Canaan and the era of the Israelite monarchy. His interpretation of the archaeological record, whether from his own celebrated excavations at Hazor and Megiddo or from other sites, was always firmly anchored in the 065Bible. Thus, he vigorously contended that archaeology supports a military conquest of Canaan under Joshua, and confidently used the Bible to assign various monumental buildings to David, Solomon, Ahab and other kings. His interpretative conceptions reflected ethnic and national consciousness rather than religious commitment; but it was also obvious that Yadin, like his predecessors in the archaeology of Palestine, was mainly interested in conspicuous historical events, such as royal building enterprises, military campaigns, wholesale destructions, etc., and not in implicit social or cultural processes. Because many of his students later became the backbone of Israeli archaeology, Yadin’s highly influential research agenda and explanatory paradigms are still with us today. Even Yohanan Aharoni, Yadin’s arch-rival who for a short time opened new interpretative horizons, in the end succumbed to the mainstream of this interpretive school with all its methodological weaknesses.

In the 1970s two methodological innovations pioneered earlier by non-Biblical archaeologists from Britain and America came to influence Biblical archaeology: a multidisciplinary approach, aimed at retrieving as much data as possible about past material culture, and a related ecological orientation. Both opened new vistas to the archaeology of Palestine, which had traditionally focused on architecture and pottery.³¹ The identification of plant and animal remains—and thus of ancient diet, subsistence economy and environment—led to an investigation of the relationship between the archaeological sites and their surrounding natural environment. No longer were individual sites excavated as phenomena unto themselves, with little regard for their relationship to their setting. Regional studies emphasized an explicit ecological approach instead of the historical orientation of traditional Biblical archaeology. Most of the change, however, was pragmatic, unaccompanied by a theoretical reformulation of the traditional explanations for culture change.

The ecological approach advocated by the anthropologically oriented “New Archaeology” in the United States and Britain was not simply the collection of new kinds of data. This had already been done at the end of the 1940s by Robert Braidwood in his search for the origins of agriculture in the highlands of Kurdistan. Rather, it reflected a different attitude toward culture and culture change as an adaptation to environmental conditions. Thus, culture was now seen as a total adaptive system comprised of the interrelationships between the natural habitat, settlement patterns, technology, economic strategies, sociopolitical organization and ideology.

Looking for the material correlates of all these cultural “sub-systems,” many of the American expeditions excavating the tells of Israel and Jordan during the 1970s added a battalion of specialists to the archaeological core staff: geologists, paleobotanists, zoologists, anthropologists, soil scientists, climatologists, etc. However, the mass of ecofacts and other data retrieved by the new scientific techniques were not yet adequately integrated so as to yield new insights and interpretations about archaeological phenomena other than the traditional “historical” ones.³² The “New Archaeology” of the 1970s in Israel was still dominated by a dichotomy between practice and theory, as well as by the powerful influence of the Albright School through a generation of American practitioners whose mentor was the highly influential Biblical archaeologist G. Ernest Wright.³³

Oddly enough the excavation method enthusiastically advocated and practiced during the 1970s and early 1980s by all American expeditions working in Israel—the so-called “balk/debris layer” method, characterized by its emphasis on stratigraphy and long narrow trenches—was diametrically opposed to the data-collection method recommended by the “New Archaeology” abroad in relation to its theoretical concepts.³⁴ In non-Biblical archaeology, only large-scale excavation of contiguous units was considered adequate to supply a representative sample of the differential distribution of human activity and social life at a site. The Israeli method of excavation, which (in contrast to the American and British methods) emphasized the exposure of large architectural complexes together with restorable pottery assemblages, seemed more consistent with the “new archaeology” than the isolated squares and narrow trenches that characterized American and British excavations in Israel and Jordan. However, since Israeli archaeologists, like their foreign colleagues working in Israel and Jordan, were more interested in culture and political history than in culture change or social reconstruction, they were unaware of the full potential of their excavation method.

Thus, despite its new scientific arsenal, Biblical archaeology during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s was still parochial, highly pragmatic and bound to traditional interpretative frameworks. Slowly, however, as previous interpretative concepts were discarded, exciting new cultural/historical insights gradually came into view, even through old research strategies. A good example is the archaeology of the Israelite settlement in the land of Canaan. As already noted, large-scale archaeological surveys were pioneered by Nelson Glueck in Transjordan already in the 1930s. Hundreds of new sites from various periods were investigated and mapped. For the first time in the history of Biblical archaeology, patterns of settlement replaced the single tell in elucidating Biblical narratives. However, Glueck did not realize that settlement patterns—the arrangement of population on a landscape—are the material manifestation of an entire mode of production and of basic characteristics of social and political organization. Moreover, Glueck’s exemplary fieldwork was not emulated by his peers on the western side of the Jordan River. Only two decades later did Yohanan Aharoni revolutionize the archaeological study of Israelite settlement in Canaan by surveying the higher, relatively inhospitable part of the Upper Galilee in a search for the early Israelite settlers outside the main Canaanite tells, eventually concluding that the Israelite Settlement was a peaceful infiltration rather than a military conquest. Nevertheless, despite the great 066potential of settlement archaeology^c as revealed in contemporaneous research in the New World and Mesopotamia, Aharoni’s later work in the Beersheba Valley reverted to the tells. It took another generation before settlement archaeology was enthusiastically adopted by younger Israeli archaeologists as an essential research tool for studying ancient demographic patterns and sociocultural changes. This renewed interest in the “people without history”—the rural backbone of ancient Canaan and Israel—countered the urban bias of traditional tell archaeology in Palestine and its near-exclusive reliance on elitist political history.

After the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israeli archaeologists were able to explore the almost terra incognita of the Central Hill Country of Canaan. This opportunity soon resulted in an explosion of new data. The intensive exploration of early Israel’s heartland revolutionized our understanding of the earliest phase of Israelite settlement in the Central Hill Country of ancient Canaan. Together with information garnered from the Archaeological Survey of Israel, initiated and sponsored by the Israel Antiquities Authority, a series of comprehensive studies of settlement and demographic patterns in ancient Palestine, from the Early Bronze Age through the Roman period, provided a wealth of new data.³⁵ Similarly, Jordanian and American archaeologists working in Jordan enabled Nelson Glueck’s work in Ammon, Moab and Edom to be revised, augmented and updated.³⁶

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of this renewed interest in settlement archaeology on the traditional interpretative framework used in the archaeology of Palestine. A wider database, a more receptive attitude toward anthropologically oriented archaeology among younger Israeli archaeologists and the “coming of age” of American Biblical archaeology, all combined to profoundly change the concepts of explanation and interpretation in Biblical archaeology.³⁷

Several aspects may be noted:

First, the reconstruction of the settlement and demographic history of Palestine introduced a long-term perspective and brought ancient Israel into normal, “secular” cultural evolution in contrast to its former position as unique, almost “suprahistorical,” as it had been in the minds of previous generations of Biblical archaeologists.

Second, environmental factors, previously ignored, became the basis for explaining not only the structure of daily life and sociopolitical organization in ancient Canaan and Israel, but also culture change.

Closely related to these two new avenues of interpretation is a third one that negates short, episodic historical events (such as migration of a new people) as an adequate explanation for culture change, and relies instead on slow, long-term changes that are deep-structured within the geographical-ecological setting of the historical scene.

All these trends demonstrate the rapprochement of modern archaeology with history, via the ideas 067advocated by the French Annales school of history and especially by its most celebrated leader Fernand Braudel.^d38 Especially appealing to archaeologists is the fact that this quest emphasizes mundane social history instead of traditional political history involving only the deeds of great men and public events.

This new approach also distinguishes different historical time scales—from the ephemeral “event” to the longue durée, the latter a much longer and slower cycle of change.

Another important addition to the new arsenal of interpretative tools of Biblical archaeology is ethnoarchaeology. Ethnographic fieldwork was already integrated with Biblical studies by the German scholar Gustav Dalman almost a century ago, but it added little because Dalman, like those who followed, lacked the expertise of modern professional anthropologists. Instead, the early gatherers of ethnographic material had an unconscious colonialist (and later a local nationalist) disdain for primitive “native customs” as a source for explanatory hypotheses about ancient high civilizations.

All this has changed. During extensive recent fieldwork, especially in the hill country of Manasseh, Ephraim and Judah, close contact with native Arabic daily life has led to the realization that ancient and modern patterns of settlement, subsistence economy and even social organization in these regions have been influenced, then as now, by the same environmental constraints. As a result, ethnography has made an important comeback into the archaeology of Palestine. A major resource in “armchair ethnohistory” involves the analysis and manipulation of data preserved in archival sources such as Ottoman tax registers of the 16th century and British Mandate censuses and official reports in the early 20th century; here we find the only reasonably complete model for various aspects of daily life in pre-modern Palestine.³⁹

The transformation of the meaning of interpretation in Biblical archaeology is best exemplified by recent research concerning the vexed issue of the Israelite Settlement in Canaan. Most conspicuous in the numerous innovative studies of this problem is the explicit divide between the Biblical and the archaeological views. Most scholars, especially younger scholars, have shown a marked preference for the latter as the basis for their interpretation. Within the new array of environmental, anthropological and ethnoarchaeological explanatory concepts, the new archaeological observations are leading to a growing consensus on the emergence of Israel from varied groups of pastoral nomads, sedentary farmers and possibly even urban families, mainly of local Canaanite origin.⁴⁰ Moreover, viewed within a long-term perspective of settlement, demographic and sociopolitical processes, the Israelite Settlement, stripped of its singular ideological context, can be explained simply as a phase in the cyclical history of Palestine during the third and second millennia B.C.E.—or in an even longer perspective, as a recurring social phenomenon related to shifts in the country’s frontier resulting from political causes.⁴¹

The recent trend in the historiography of Biblical archaeology tends to replace the common “success story” of continuous progress from superstition to truth with a more realistic, non-linear perspective. Moreover, the majority of younger American and Israeli archaeologists working in Israel and Jordan are less bound to the pervasive theological and nationalistic intellectual frameworks of former generations.

Nevertheless, one wonders whether the post-normative, “processual” explanatory conceptions now prevalent in the archaeology of Palestine are really satisfying in light of the unique database available, which is so rich both in empirical information taken from the ground and textual sources preserved in ancient literature, especially the Bible. Pursuing this question William Dever 096calls for the establishment of a “new Biblical archaeology,” involving a renewed dialogue between Palestinian archaeology and Biblical studies.⁴² Contending that the professionalization and secularization of Biblical archaeology during the last two decades has gone too far in severing the archaeology of Palestine from literary sources, Dever claims that the present generation of Palestinian archaeologists has failed to achieve a proper balance. An explanation of “what happened in history” cannot be reduced, as in many recent works, merely to adaptation—to materialist or determinist schemes that take into account only such factors as environment, technology or subsistence, and ignore the role of symbol, ideology and even religion, in the shaping of society and in culture change. Dever argues that “an explanation of what really took place in ancient Israel in the Iron Age must look not only at the material remains of that culture, but also at those ideals, spiritual and secular…that motivated those who were the bearers of that culture.” Thus, for example, the intensive archaeological fieldwork during the last decades can shed much light on popular or folk religion—what the majority of people in ancient Israel in fact believed and practiced. The material remains of actual religious practices and individual human behavior exposed in excavations offer an alternative (or rather a complementary) popular perspective to the normative “official” religion advocated in the Bible by the elitist orthodox establishment.

Dever’s plea, then, is for a new critical dialogue between Palestinian archaeologists and the Biblical texts in order, first, to enter the thought-world of ancient Israel, and, second, to write a more satisfying history of ancient Israel, based on both artifactual and textual data.

Dever’s new agenda for Palestinian archaeology, incorporating the “New Archaeology” of the 1970s, the “post-processual,” “contextual archaeology” of the 1980s, and an interaction with Biblical studies is both timely and attractive. Even a cursory review of current literature reveals that the archaeology of Palestine is once again shifting, though admittedly very slowly, into a new phase in its continuing quest for an adequate interpretative framework.

At least a handful of recent essays may be considered as harbingers of a new trend in Palestinian archaeology. Some of these essays, elucidating the background for the major culture change in Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age (the time when Israel came on the scene), try to restore equilibrium between artifactual and textual data, as well as balance the different time scales they reflect. Adopting a post-Braudelian Annales perspective, they combine a search for long-term general and cyclic patterns of cultural processes—evident in the archaeological and ethnohistorical data—with an interest in short term, particular and unexpected historical events depicted in contemporaneous texts.⁴³

Other essays, concerning the Israelite settlement in Canaan and the period of the Judges, further exemplify a fruitful combination of cultural information extracted from Biblical texts and “processual” archaeological data (such as settlement patterns, demographic shifts and changes in socio-economic structure).⁴⁴

Ancient ideology, another favorite topic of the “post-processual” archaeology, has also become a “hot” issue in current Palestinian archaeology; its different aspects are being examined through a whole range of archaeological remains. Thus, for example, the question of Israelite and Philistine ethnicity has been addressed afresh, interpreting differences in diet and food production (revealed by paleozoological and pottery analyses) as ideological components of ethnicity.⁴⁵ Other researchers have called attention to possible ideological factors underlying the “domestic mode of production”—the individual, self-sufficient households that characterized the socio-economic structure of early Israel. They also noted the decline of cult installations during the 12th to 11th centuries B.C.E. Both phenomena may reflect an “anti-autocratic” or “egalitarian” spirit within early Israel.⁴⁶

All this intriguing recent work in Biblical archaeology, with its innovative contextual approach to culture and the sophisticated manipulation of science, anthropology and history, is, I believe, more than simply the latest fad. I agree with Dever’s assessment that this recent work represents a critical balance of the best of the old and the new in archaeological theory and method. The skeptical reader of this short introduction to the subject of interpretation in Biblical archaeology may wonder if the emerging “new Biblical archaeology” will really lead to a “truer” and more objective understanding of ancient Canaan and Israel than before. Since our perspective on this newborn explanatory trend is as yet too short, the reader will have to wait for the next major BAR anniversary to get an adequate evaluation.

The common romantic image of the archaeologist—a discoverer clearing his way through the jungle to explore ruined cities and temples or crawling into mysterious tombs full of ancient gold and spells—belies reality, of course. Modern archaeology is about interpretation as much as discovery. True, the archaeologist’s prime tasks are excavation and collection of facts about the human past. But these facts are mute; they do not speak for themselves; they must be interpreted. Only through interpretation is meaning assigned to the archaeological finds. Without interpretation, archaeology is no more than treasure hunting. Even trivial, routine archaeological statements like […]