New Dig Reports: After the Dust Settles—Reports on Dig Reports

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Every year BAR publishes excavation opportunities for willing volunteers. While highlighting the sweat, the long hours and the hard work, we also try to capture the excitement of discovery. After all, it is not every day that a Roman coin, Canaanite text or Judahite fortress is unearthed!

This is just the beginning, however. After the dust settles, the long process of interpretation and publication begins. Every artifact and layer of stratigraphy must be analyzed and catalogued. All the raw data must be synthesized. The work grows like mushrooms. The task expands sometimes for decades. The publication of a final excavation report often requires years of analysis, but the publication does not usually receive the same fanfare as the physical act of excavation. In this new BAR department, we applaud the efforts of scholars who succeed in this final step of the excavation process and inform our readers generally of the accomplishment.

In this issue, we highlight two recent volumes that have far-reaching implications for illuminating the Iron Age of the southern Levant.

Qeiyafa

Khirbet Qeiyafa, vol. 2, Excavation Report 2009–2013: Stratigraphy and Architecture (Areas B, C, D, E)

By Yosef Garfinkel, Saar Ganor and Michael G. Hasel; edited by Martin G. Klingbeil
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Khirbet Qeiyafa Expedition, 2014), 674 pp., 601 color illustrations and maps, 154 tables, $88 (hardcover)

Excavations at Qeiyafa, overlooking the Elah Valley southwest of Jerusalem, exposed an extraordinary Israelite fortress that the excavators date to the time of the United Monarchy.

Enclosed by a casemate wall with two imposing gates, Qeiyafa boasts a major structure on the summit. The existence of a fortified site like this at this time implies a central government.^a Among the finds is a rare ostracon with a dim inscription regarding some moral matter, in the realm of ethics and justice.^b

Qeiyafa was excavated for seven years: from 2007 to 2013. In 2009, the Khirbet Qeiyafa team published the first volume of their final report series, which covered their first two years of excavation. This volume covers the last five years of excavation.

Edom

New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom, Southern Jordan

By Thomas E. Levy, Mohammad Najjar and Erez Ben-Yosef
(Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2014), 2 volumes, 1090 pp., 861 color and b&w illustrations, 72 tables, $169 (cloth bound)

With hundreds of beautiful images and helpful tables, as well as a DVD with supplementary photography and chapter materials, this two-volume set pulls together ten years of fieldwork in the area. Its focus is the role of technology on state formation, especially in the Faynan region, which boasts the largest deposits of copper ore in the Southern Levant.

While previous archaeological research suggested that Edom did not become a state until the seventh or sixth century B.C.E., the findings here pushed Edom’s chronology back 300 years into the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E. (Iron Age IIA). Complex societies existed in Edom in the early Iron Age II. These societies constructed monumental architecture and organized industrial-scale copper production.

These volumes describe mining, copper production sites, fortresses, ceramics, trade routes, the Edomite script and language, burials and diet—and much more—in Iron Age Edom.