Books in Brief

012

The Old Testament and the Archaeologist

H. Darrell Lance

(Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1981) 98 pp., paperback, $4.50

This short book introduces the student to archaeological methods and the assumptions that underlie the reconstruction of history from artifacts.

Lance begins by reviewing the history of Near Eastern archaeology, emphasizing the development of methodology and interpretation. He briefly describes discoveries and their significance, spanning the almost two centuries since Napoleon’s troops unearthed the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1798.

Next the author introduces the two basic principles of any modern archaeological “exegesis” of the ancient ruin: stratigraphy, the controlled removal of occupation layers, and typology, the distinguishing characteristics of artifacts that belong to the same chronological phase of occupation.

After describing the various kinds of archaeological reports—the raw material of interpretation—Lance tackles the complex problem of relating the results of the archaeological endeavor to Biblical interpretation. The author briefly considers the proper use of archaeological materials in the interpretation of the Old Testament, and then attempts to demonstrate his approach by a specific major example. The example he chooses is the Age of Solomon, a period about which there is more scholarly consensus than many other periods.

In an involved but brilliant discussion of archaeological data and Biblical history, Lance leads his readers, at least those who can stay with him, in the search for “Solomonic” levels and pottery, buildings and gateways, and even for Jerusalem and the Temple. The search for Solomon’s Temple is the most frustrating because, although there are extensive Biblical accounts of the Temple, the surviving archaeological evidence is meager—only one battered joint in the Herodian enclosure wall that may be part of the original corner of the Solomonic enclosure. But fragments of material remains are the stuff of Biblical archaeology: the scholar must cultivate patience and learn to live with major unanswered questions.

In a short final chapter, Lance discusses the future of the name “Biblical archaeology,” a term that is increasingly under attack (see “Should the Term ‘Biblical Archaeology’ Be Abandoned?” BAR 07:03, and Queries & Comments, BAR 07:05). Lance stoutly defends the use of the term because “the focus of Biblical archaeology is the Bible, not Palestine,” and it properly indicates a “Biblical discipline which exists for the benefit and interest of Biblical studies.”

Unfortunately, Lance’s book perpetuates some conceptual and methodological errors which, critics of the appellation Biblical archaeology say, gave it its bad name in the first place.

Take, for example, his use of the term locus, (plural: loci). A locus is a stratigraphical unit. When the concept of locus first came into vogue, archaeologists analyzed pottery (or other artifacts) from various loci, and, if the pottery or artifacts were from the same period, these objects defined the stratum. Lance utilizes this concept of locus. Within very broad limits, this is accurate. But today, techniques are more advanced. Particularly because of the influence of the British School of archaeology, strata are now more precisely defined by observed natural bedlines of layers in the earth. Locus, therefore can mean a unit of a layer; it is used inappropriately to define a layer of occupational debris.

The “section” drawing, or simply “section” as it is called, is a vertical profile which records the layers in the wall of an excavation square (this wall is called a balk). Its primary purpose is to help the archaeologist define the layers and to control their removal. Lance suggests that the primary purpose of the “section” drawing is simply to record “the relationship of loci as they originated in the process of the mound’s formation.” To this reviewer, this is clearly a secondary purpose of a section, far subordinate to the assistance which the section drawing provides to the dirt archaeologist in the field.

As concerns the interpretation of archaeological materials, Lance assumes that Biblical events may be correlated to archaeological evidence concurrent to a reconstruction of those events. Max Miller, in The Old Testament and the Historian, another volume in this same series by Fortress Press, pointed out the circularity of such connections The Bible provides the basis for an interpretation of a destruction layer in an archaeological site—for example, that Shishak of Egypt was responsible for a destruction; but the discovery of the destruction layer then supports the historical truth of the Biblical 013account. Professor Lance is not unaware of the trap in this kind of correlation, but he defends it as a “circularity of conversation and constant revision.”

The problem is that circles are complete, not open-ended. Particularly when such circularities are propounded by so eminent a scholar as William F. Albright, they are difficult to escape. Albright was guilty of fallacious thinking, for example, in his reconstruction of Israel’s conquest of Canaan. He assumed that evidence of the late 13th century B.C. destruction of cities named in the Biblical conquest narratives was the result of Israelite military action, and that subsequent Iron Age I villages were settlements of the incoming Israelites. The archaeological evidence fit the time and cultural character of the events reconstructed from the Biblical text. The Bible and the archaeological evidence each supported the other in what Lance would describe as the “circularity of conversation” between the archaeological evidence and the Bible.

However, if one applies the recently introduced techniques of settlement pattern analysis to the Iron Age I sites in Palestine, a quite different picture can be reconstructed. The villages are spread across the hill country and into the coastal plain, reaching from the region of Gaza to Abu Hawam near Haifa, and across the Esdraelon Plain to Afula. A good case can be made for a migration of these villagers from north to south, and then from west to east, or from the plains areas into the hill country. When conclusions like these are brought into “conversation” with the Biblical account of a mass movement from east to west across the Jordan River to Jericho, Ai, and so on, there is no circularity of argument and no evidentiary mutual support. In fact, as Albright wrote to me when I broached these possibilities to him, it leaves one with “historical vertigo.”

Perhaps it is time Biblical archaeology had an attack of historical vertigo, because then it might break out of what Lance calls in another context “the dogmatism of fixed positions.” In “the anarchy of perpetual tentativeness” we need to seek new guidelines and conditions that can serve Biblical scholars in the decade of the 1980’s.

014

A Short History of Archaeology

Glyn Daniel

(Thames & Hudson, Ltd., London, 1981) 232 pp., 146 illustrations, $17.95

This is the one-hundredth volume in the “Ancient Peoples and Places” series, edited since its inception in 1956 by Glyn Daniel. Over the past quarter-century this series has provided a wealth of up-to-date and understandable books for the general reader interested in antiquity. Once described by Cyril Connolly as “the ideal bridge between highbrow and lowbrow,” the series has well-fulfilled its publishers’ and editor’s intention “to save archaeology from falling back into its own dust.”

A Short History of Archaeology was a fitting subject for the series’ one-hundredth volume, and Daniel the appropriate person to write it. He has already produced a half-dozen texts on aspects of archaeological history, including Man Discovers His Past, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology, and A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology. This volume necessarily goes over again some of the ground covered (or rather uncovered) in those previous works. But here is a fresh overview of considerable scope, from the establishment of the Society of Dilettanti in 1732 to discoveries as recent as 1980.

No single discovery can be described at length, of course, and every reader will miss one or another episode not treated in this unfolding drama from the dust. BAR readers, for instance, may be disappointed that Jerusalem is not mentioned at all, Megiddo and the Dead Sea Scrolls warrant only one sentence each. As Daniel points out, however, if everything had been included this would not be “a short history.”

What one does find here is an impressive panorama stretching around the globe and back in time over the past three centuries. Our attention is drawn particularly to the great pioneers and to the “landmark” excavations and discoveries. Here is the story of the gradual emergence of genuine archaeological awareness, of the transition from mere treasure hunting to the scientific search for knowledge about the past, of the dramatic pushing backward of the dawn of human “pre-history” millennia earlier than Bishop Ussher’s 4044 B.C., and of the struggle to develop technologies adequate to the task of sifting knowledge from the soil.

Daniel has organized his survey into five periods, and in each period he discusses the important developments in several major geographic areas of the world. BAR readers will be interested to see the discoveries in the Middle East placed in the larger context of what was happening in Europe, Asia and America at the same time.

Here we are reminded, for instance, that it was Thomas Jefferson, at Monticello in 1784, who conducted the earliest responsible archaeological excavations. Investigating ancient burial-mounds on his property, he applied both a scientific method—separating materials stratigraphically and recording meticulously—and a scientific purpose—seeking to answer questions about the moundbuilders. (See William H. Stiebing, Jr., “Who First Excavated Stratigraphically?” BAR 07:01)

Daniel also gives an honest portrayal of some of archaeology’s less noble characters: the tomb-robbers, the forgers, the greedy and the gullible.

The numerous illustrations include many which we do not find in the standard surveys: 18th century engravings of the pyramids, Pompeii and Greek temples; pictures of the great pioneers themselves often “in situ” (Austin Henry Layard, the 19th century excavator of Nimrud, for instance, shown dressed in native Bakhtiyari costume); and rare photographs of important early excavations, from General Pitt-Rivers’s stratigraphic excavation at Wor Barrow in Dorset in 1893 to Mortimer Wheeler’s experiments with grid-squares in South India during the 1940’s.

His final sections include a good summary of the recent development of laboratory procedures for archaeology and an impressive catalogue of the major discoveries of the past 40 years.

There is also a critical assessment of the so-called “new archaeology” of the 1960’s which Daniel points out is not so “new” after all. He charges its more strident exponents, in fact, with being both naive in their ignorance of the history of their own discipline and overly pretentious in their confident claims for what archaeology can accurately tell us about an ancient culture.

For one who has been involved in a lifelong love-affair with archaeology, Daniel is much more modest in his own expectations than the new archaeologists. Daniel’s words are perhaps worth quoting because at this point, he shifts his attention from the history of archaeology to its future prospects:

“My view is that after the turmoil and heart-searching discussion prompted by the ‘new’ archaeology, archaeology will return, strengthened and refreshed, to its proper role of writing the history of man in the fullest possible sense. Most of the wise and good historians have failed to find universal laws in the human past, and certainly nothing that will help the human future. The new archaeologists of the 1960’s and their present followers in Britain and Scandinavia will 015become the disillusioned men of the 1980’s and 1990’s, realizing that man’s past is something to be recorded, described, appreciated and understood, but that the hope of discovering laws of cultural dynamics in archaeology and anthropology is probably a vain one doomed to failure. I may be proved wrong, however; the history of archaeology is full of false assumptions and predictions.”

Ariel Publications, Jerusalem, Israel

The Old Testament and the Archaeologist