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The Mistress of Stratigraphy Had Clay Feet

Kathleen Kenyon’s Flawed Jerusalem Excavation

By Hershel Shanks

Excavations by Kathleen M. Kenyon in Jerusalem 1961–1967, Volume III—The Settlement in the Bronze and Iron Ages

M.L. Steiner
(London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) 158 pp., $105, hardback

Much as armies through the centuries have battled over Jerusalem, so scholars have fought over its history. What, for example, was Jerusalem like in the tenth century B.C.E., a period that the Bible describes as the time of Israel’s glory, the age of the United Monarchy, when David and Solomon ruled over Israel and Judah? Despite the Biblical picture of a period of wealth and power, the archaeological evidence from that time is sparse. Some so-called Biblical minimalists have questioned the very existence of the United Monarchy and even of David and Solomon. Between 1961 and 1967 Dame Kathleen […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Nadav Na’aman, “It Is There: Ancient Texts Prove It,” BAR 10:01. See also Margreet Steiner, “It’s Not There: Archaeology Proves a Negative,” BAR 24:04 and Jane Cahill, “It Is There: The Archaeological Evidence Proves It,” BAR 24:04.

2.

In addition, as Richard Hess recently pointed out, Abdi-Heba’s letters sometimes display “an extraordinary quantity of rhetorical features when compared with the remaining letters in this collection.” This would hardly be expected of the “manager” of an estate.

3.

See Hershel Shanks, “A ‘Centrist’ at the Center of Controversy,” BAR 28:06.

Endnotes

1.

Kathleen Kenyon, Jerusalem—Excavating 3,000 Years of History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967) and Digging Up Jerusalem (New York: Praeger, 1974).

2.

The project also includes this previously published work: H.J. Franken and M.L. Steiner, Excavations in Jerusalem 1961–1967, vol. 2, The Extramural Quarter on the South-East Hill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). Publication of the coins, inscriptions, seals, flint, some closed pottery groups, human and animal bones, shells, stone weights, hammer stones and figurines have been assigned to specialists in these various fields. Most of the work is “still to be done” and little of it is published.

3.

Steiner makes the same kind of argument with the mention of Jerusalem in “Egyptian Execration” texts from the 19th or 18th century B.C.E., when, again, Steiner finds no evidence for a settlement at Jerusalem. “The mentioning of this name alone cannot be used as ‘proof’ that Jerusalem was an important town then, as the name need not specify a town—it could as easily indicate a region or a tribe.”