Endnote 34 – How Mute Stones Speak: Interpreting What We Dig Up

See Binford, An Archaeological Perspective, pp. 129–130, 183. For a critical review of the implementation of the “New Archaeology” in Palestine, see my essay “The ‘New Archaeology’ and the Archaeology of Palestine,” Archaeologia 3 (1992), pp. 59–67 (Hebrew). One should note the hot debate about proper field methodology that raged at the beginning of the 1970s between American and Israeli Biblical archaeologists; see for example: Wright, Archaeological Method in Palestine; William G. Dever, “Two Approaches to Archaeological Method—the Architectural and the Stratigraphic,” Eretz-Israel 11 (1981), pp. 1*–8*; Yohanan Aharoni, “Remarks on the ‘Israeli’ Method of Excavation,” Eretz-Israel 11 (1981), pp. 48–53 (Hebrew). Evidently, the flagship of American “New Archaeology” in Palestine during the 1970s—the Gezer excavations—did not produce any innovative insights into the cultural systems of the ancient inhabitants of the site. Moreover, even the traditional “political history” of Gezer, reconstructed by the American excavators, became a perennial source of scholarly debate; compare, for example, two of William G. Dever’s articles written 20 years apart: “The Gezer Fortifications and the ‘High Place’: An Illustration of Stratigraphic Methods and Problems,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1973, pp. 61–70, and “Further Evidence on the Date of the Outer Wall at Gezer,” BASOR 289 (1993), pp. 33–54.