Prehistory of the Levant

The economic specializations that still sustain people living in the Middle East began in prehistory. From the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the cultivation of wheat, lentils, barley and, later, olives, grapes and dates, developed along with the domestication of goats and sheep. Click on the chart to get a closer look at these and other milestones for each of the important prehistoric periods.

Archaeological Orientations and Methods in the Land of the Bible

Classical and Near Eastern archaeologists have found themselves to be quite comfortable working in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. One group that is still underrepresented, however, is that of anthropological archaeologists. Anthropologists make up only a small percentage of the membership of the major research institutes and, while their participation is growing, most of them do not work on Biblical sites.

Work in the lands of the Bible has produced some defining moments in the history of archaeological method. Flinders Petrie began working in Palestine in 1890 and developed his system of constructing chronological sequences based upon pottery, recovered from different strata of an archaeological site, partly because of his work there. There was very little interest in pottery by his contemporaries but versions of his approach have found their way into the practice of archaeology globally. William Foxwell Albright’s method of interpreting and incorporating historical resources into the study of artifacts and sites has become a part of historical archaeological approaches worldwide. Albright, working in the Holy Land from the 1920’s forward, brought together Biblical, Near Eastern, historical and archaeological scholarship in a way that had never been accomplished by previous researchers.

Methods of site excavation, specifically adapted to “tell” environments (see illustration) have been a primary concern from all Near Eastern Archaeologists. The traditional technique of recovering complete architectural units, referred to as the “architectural layers” approach, focused on the horizontal exposure of important features as they were discovered. Every effort was made to recover the extant remains of such features before proceeding to lower layers. This approach has been particularly useful for researchers interested in defining the plans of monumental buildings like palaces, temples and fortifications. It is also important for sites that will be presented to the public.

In the fifties and sixties, in excavations at Jericho and the City of David, Kathleen Kenyon introduced an alternative practice. The so-called Wheeler-Kenyon Method (having been first developed by Kenyon’s mentor Mortimer Wheeler) is concerned largely with the vertical rather than the horizontal dimension. This method divides the excavation space into a grid of five-meter squares with two-meter wide walls (called “balks”) in between. The squares are excavated down to bedrock in carefully recorded layers and the balks only removed after the excavation of the site is complete. This method does not expose structures in a consistent manner as the layer method does nor is it a good choice for sites that will be presented to the public. Instead, it is intended to provide a clear and complete chronological sequence for the site.

Few excavators today follow a doctrinaire approach to excavation and a variety of methods are used based upon the research goals of the expedition. Much of the work being done in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority is salvage or “rescue” archaeology and surveys—both of them driven by the rapid pace of industrial and residential development in these countries.

The Bible in the Ancient Near East? Ideology and the Archaeology of the "Holy Land"

Middle Eastern Archaeology of periods after prehistory and before the Byzantine era is generally divided among Biblical, Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptological schools. Near Eastern archaeologists and Egyptologists habitually draw distinctions between their fields and that of “pre” (i.e., linguistically challenged) historians and anthropological archaeologists. Regardless of one’s orientation, however, the Bible looms large in the history of all of these disciplines. The development of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern archaeology was partially influenced by a general Christian religious interest in the lands mentioned in the Bible while the exploration of sites in Israel, Palestine and Jordan, was directly tied to an enlightenment-inspired belief that the Biblical text could be proven scientifically. Despite the fact that, after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, this quest was partially transfomed by nationalist interests, the Bible continues to affect how sites are viewed by the public and by officials.

One story, perhaps apocryphal that has made the rounds of archaeologists in the region, for example, concerns a prominent prehistorian’s discovery of Upper Paleolithic human remains in one of the Carmel Caves. As required by law, he informed the religious authorities in Israel. These individuals normally take an avid interest in the discovery of skeletons, asserting that every human bone found in the Land of Israel today is deserving of a decent Jewish burial. The archaeologist was, to his relief, not to be deprived of his important find. Reportedly, he was told of this in a letter which, loosely translated, ceded jurisdiction over the remains because they appeared “to date from before creation.”

Nadia Abu El-Haj in Facts on the Ground describes Israeli Archaeology as consistently conflating text, dogmatic belief and practice but, in truth, this state of affairs predates the founding of the State of Israel by over one hundred years. The ideologies in question began with the written word. The Bible, “supported” by cuneiform tablets, papyri, scrolls and inscriptions, has a privileged status beyond that of mere artifact. One ignores the text at the peril of making one’s work irrelevant, as there are few who will refer to an archaeology of the “Holy Land” denuded of its associations with the Bible. Scholars who have attempted this to do this are dismissed by many of their colleagues as “minimalists.” The term is an interesting choice in that it implies a kind of austerely modern approach to archaeology. In any other context, it would connote an elimination of the extraneous—a reduction of a work to its most fundamental features suggesting that a minimalist approach would eliminate any consideration of the Biblical Text altogether. This is far from case, however, as a minimalist and a maximalist are both equally defined by their textual approach.

Ideology in the archaeology of the "Holy Land" effectively began in the late nineteenth century when exploration of the region by intrepid Europeans combined religion with an imperialist ethos of exploration for the sake of it and for the glory of the motherland. Starting in the twenties, others came—committed Christian religionists from European monasteries, Jesuit institutes, protestant and Jewish theological seminaries. The seminarians, as many of us refer to them, persist to this day, with a sizable percentage of the American Schools for Oriental Research, the organization of archaeologists in Palestine, being made up of ministers, priests and rabbis. It is this legacy that is the language and the means by which method has become informed. It is the primary reason why archaeology in this region is different from that practiced anywhere else in the world.