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“The mistress of technique in digging,” the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, perched on a mudbrick wall, takes notes at Jericho, which she excavated between 1952 and 1958. Her meticulous, systematic excavations focused on careful observation of soil layers. But she extrapolated far beyond the evidence from her confined squares to reconstruct the cultural history of all Palestine. Kenyon invariably identified archaeological developments with conquests and migrations, ignoring other cultural or natural changes that could have accounted for the remains in her carefully excavated layers.