Prominent British Scholar Assesses Kathleen Kenyon

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In the latest issue of the Palestine Exploration Quarterly (January–June 1979), P. R. S. Moorey of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has written a remarkably candid assessment of the achievements and failures of Dame Kathleen Kenyon who for a quarter of a century before her death in August 1978 dominated the British contribution to Palestinian archaeology.^a

Encased in an elegant and understated British prose style, Moorey’s article not only assesses Dame Kathleen in comparison with other colossi in the field, but also touches on the dismal failure of archaeologists to publish their primary data, attributing this failure in part to strictures of a too-meticulous methodology. These are enormously important subjects, rarely discussed in print.

Of Dame Kathleen’s personality and character, Moorey has only praise: “brilliant excavator,” “shrewd administrator,” “outstandingly energetic and instructive lecturer and writer,” “decisive manner,” “infectious enthusiasm,” “boisterous sense of humor,” “essential warmth of heart,” “generously encouraging and vigorously stimulating, never aloof or patronizing.”

Moorey appraises her contributions in two categories: First as an excavator; secondly as a writer and especially as an historian.

Her significance as an excavator stems from the importance of the sites she dug—Samaria, Jericho, Jerusalem—and from her important methodological contributions.

In the first half of the 1930s, Kenyon spent her summers excavating with Mortimer Wheeler at the Roman site of Verulamium (St. Albans) near London, and her springs excavating with J. W. Crowfoot at Samaria in Palestine. The precise, careful methods of stratigraphical digging she learned and helped develop at Roman sites in Britain, she took year after year to Palestine. Moorey remarks, “Wheeler and, to a rather lesser extent, Kathleen Kenyon came to see unusual virtue for Near Eastern archaeologists in a basic training on Romano-British sites.” He adds, however, “This extravagant view has been cogently challenged by Seton Lloyd, whose unusually wide experience of excavating tells reinforces his strictures (Mounds of the Near East [Edinburgh, 1963]).”

Samaria is a tel of enormous complexity—enough to challenge the most brilliant of excavators. Excavations were conducted there in 1909–10 by George Reisner of Harvard University, assisted by his able colleague Clarence S. Fisher, also of Harvard. Their careful, stratigraphic methodology is sometimes referred to as the Reisner-Fisher method. Reisner’s 1924 report on Samaria to some extent forecasts the Wheeler-Kenyon method. As Moorey states: “The brilliant insights of Reisner’s 1924 report on his work [at Samaria] in 1909–10 anticipate much that is fundamental to the so-called Wheeler-Kenyon method. … Certainly Reisner deserves more credit than Kathleen Kenyon gave him in her paper on method in 1939.”^b

Kenyon published Samaria-Sebaste, Volume III: The Objects in 1957. As Moorey tells us, “In the absence of completed reports on the tell at Jericho and on her work at Jerusalem, Kathleen Kenyon’s contributions to the Samaria-Sebaste volumes will remain the only full publication of her techniques in excavation and pottery analysis.”

In the British excavations at Samaria in 1931–35, the British method of dating was followed. According to this method, a building is dated by pottery and other finds actually associated with the building, such as the foundation trenches of the walls and the composition of the floors. The pottery and other finds uncovered there may include material from an earlier period, dropped by the builders, but the building is dated by the latest object in the building deposits.

By contrast, most American and Israeli archaeologists—for example, Yigael Yadin at Hazor—date a building according to the date of the material left on the floor. Kenyon objected to this method unless careful, field-observed section drawings were published with the finds. Otherwise, Kenyon contended, the archaeologist could not be sure that the material on the floor had not dropped there from later destruction debris or as a result of robber disturbance. Rarely were the section drawings in other excavations sufficient to meet her standards.

This methodological argument over the proper dating method has not yet been resolved in print, but, Moorey observes, “I suspect, to say no more, that time will show Kathleen Kenyon to have been largely right in method and practice in the field.” By contrast, her comparative ceramic typologies are likely to be found “at fault in details.”^c

Kenyon dug at Jericho from 1952 to 1957. Jericho, as Moorey notes, “was an almost perfect tell for demonstrating the full potential of the Wheeler-Kenyon method. It had deposits covering eight millennia; fascinating problems raised by earlier excavators remained to be resolved; and its Biblical associations assured international attention.” Kenyon’s deep trench at Jericho, dug with precise stratigraphic control and systematic layer-by-layer recording “convincingly demonstrated the errors of earlier work, provided a long chronological sequence of artifacts, and magnificently pointed the best way to re-examine the great tells of the region: Ai, Gezer, Shechem, Ta’anach, to name but a few of those subsequently reexcavated.”

One of the most serious criticisms of Kenyon’s method is that it is so painstaking, so meticulous, and requires such detailed record-keeping and so many section drawings that too little is ever dug in this way to get any real understanding of the overall picture. As Moorey expresses it: “One criticism above all others demands the serious attention of anyone attempting to assess Kathleen Kenyon’s contribution to field archaeology at Samaria, Jericho and Jerusalem. [William G.] Dever and [Yohanan] Aharoni particularly have urged it. ‘They (her methods) are so tedious and demanding in application,’ writes Dever, ‘that scarcely ever is a single building completely cleared, let alone a building complex large enough to give us an adequate exposure on which to base our understanding of the material culture of the period.’^d … The truth of the second part of Dever’s comment is there for all to see in her work. At Jericho she was painfully aware of it and once talked of returning in the 1960s to correct the balance.”

In less extreme form than she advocated, her methods have nevertheless been employed in the 1960s and 1970s by virtually all British, Jordanian, American and European excavators. The five-meter square, the balks or catwalks between them, providing a connected record of stratigraphy, section drawings of the balks, careful recording—all are seen today everywhere in the Near East. This is true of Israeli excavators as well (with whom American archaeologists are today often associated), although the so-called architectural tradition, which exposes entire buildings from which the balks have been removed, has also been a dominant feature in Israeli archaeology. (The architectural tradition is best exemplified by Israeli archaeologist ‘Munya’ Dunayevsky who died in 1968.)

Israeli archaeologists were, of course, unable to watch Kenyon’s work in progress either at Jericho or Jerusalem, for at the time she dug these areas were part of Jordan. Perhaps this explains why her work was for a time less influential in Israel. In any event, recent developments suggest that a blend of the Israeli architectural tradition with the method involving the deep trench and five-meter squares with balks is not impossible. Moorey observes that these two distinct approaches are by no means incompatible methods of stratigraphical excavation. Indeed, a combination of these methods is the rule in use today.

An important difference between more recent American and Israeli excavations, on the one hand, and Kenyon’s excavations, on the other, is that the former are clearly a team effort characterized by very considerable delegation of authority and responsibility even for writing up the results. By contrast, in Moorey’s words: “Kathleen Kenyon was a natural autocrat for whom systematic delegation was virtually impossible. It gave her the strengths of a great general in the field, singularity of purpose, firm control of strategy and decisive tactics; but with the large, young supervisory teams she used, especially at Jerusalem (1961–67), it came to place almost inhuman demands on her powers of concentration, assimilation and attention to detail. It could also distance the site-supervisors from a coherent view of the task in hand and was to cripple the final publication of her field work [at Jerusalem].” As Moorey notes,“She died with the Jericho tell report only partially written and with no final report on Jerusalem begun. Without them her long-term impact will inevitably he muted.”

To apply her method, says Moorey, “to material recovered on the large scale she had worked, and this is the key to the problem, required those teams of publication assistants she never created. To apply the Wheeler-Kenyon method properly and to publish the results on any but the smallest scale is a task, as the Americans have realized, for carefully balanced and integrated teams, not for one person, even with the remarkable determination and capacity for hard work Kathleen Kenyon conspicuously had.”

Although Moorey does not say so, it could be added that failure to publish the primary data from excavations is by no means confined to Kathleen Kenyon or to British archaeologists.

There are numerous and conspicuous failures in this regard among leading Israeli and American archaeologists as well. The facts are little short of disgrace. To detail these facts might well alienate half the archaeological world. In that world today, there is no more important problem. It should be met in a deliberate, specific, and systematic manner by organizations of archaeologists, on an international basis or on a national basis. At the very least, the problem should be openly addressed by the archaeological community.

Moorey refers to Jerusalem, the last of Kenyon’s sites, as the “Everest of Palestinian archaeology.” Kenyon’s work on the eastern slopes of the City of David where she dug a major trench, was, he says, as fine as the best of her work at Jericho. But, as he recognizes, “Subsequent horizontal exposures have easily superseded in significance the small soundings which were all circumstances allowed her elsewhere” in other areas of Jerusalem. Large horizontal areas have been exposed in Jerusalem since 1967 by a host of Israeli excavators who have demonstrated the errors of Kenyon’s conclusions based on small soundings which dot the area surrounding her major trench. The Israeli excavators include people like Benjamin Mazar, Meir Ben-Dov, Magen Broshi, Dan Bahat, Nachman Avigad and, most recently, Yigal Shiloh.

Of Kenyon’s two popular books on Jerusalem—Jerusalem—Excavating 3000 Years of History (1967) and Digging up Jerusalem (1974)—Moorey acknowledges that they “too easily lose the reader in a mass of topographical and archaeological detail. Gratuitous errors creep in and the fascination of that legendary city’s history is somehow missing. Nor did her archaeological evidence always resolve the problems she thought it did.”

Moorey’s judgment of Kenyon as a historian is blunt: “Her historical explanations [are] simplistic.” “Neither an intellectual by temperament nor a scholar by training, she is not seen to advantage in much of this work.”

In most of her academic writing, Moorey says, “she was forever in the shadow of two giants, William Foxwell Albright and Father [Roland] de Vaux. Distinguished excavators as they were, they do not rank with her, as she cannot be ranked with them in scholarship. They were both highly trained and supremely gifted scholars in Biblical studies and in ancient languages, which she was not. In writing they deployed a range and depth of learning, and a fineness of judgment, to which she could not lay claim, whilst the insights, the acute historical sense and the skill in generalization common to their work is of a far higher order than anything she commanded.”

According to Moorey, Albright’s The Archaeology of Palestine far surpasses Kenyon’s Archaeology in the Holy Land. Similarly, Father de Vaux’s Ancient Israel (and more recently his The Early History of Israel) is far superior to Kenyon’s contributions to the Cambridge Ancient History.

The comparison is admittedly a harsh test: “the touchstones are acknowledged masterpieces of compression, in which all the important material available at the time of writing was concisely assembled, shrewdly assessed and attractively presented.”

Kenyon’s errors are in part the result of her failure to keep up with the literature and of her use of her own excavations, especially at Jericho, as the key to historical explanations. As Moorey notes, “Jericho dominates Archaeology in the Holy Land and the Cambridge Ancient History chapters, often quite out of proportion to its significance.”

Moorey adds: “From 1952 onwards, as the literature of the subject grew at an ever accelerating pace, she increasingly lost touch with it. Her other preoccupations hardly left time for the required reading, none for its calm appraisal. As it was, she read relatively little of what others wrote and came to depend too much on her excavations and the two or three major site reports with which she had long been most familiar. They may have been the key ones; but in isolation they were not enough, when it came to writing for the Cambridge Ancient History in association with de Vaux. Judged by such high standards, and she was too good to deserve less, she may often be faulted.”

(For further details see Peter R. S. Moorey, “Kathleen Kenyon and Palestinian Archaeology,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, January–June 1979, pp. 3–10.)