Hi WT, nice to hear from you again.
Would you mind substantiating the "improved techniques" that tip the scales in favor of Kenyon's date ?
The greatest improvement was her new technique that controls the removal of layers from ancient tells. She excavated from bedrock right through to the top of the mound and dated occupation at the site to go back to 9000 BCE.
The technique she developed caused a revolution on archaeological methodology, if you want to read more about it, it is called the ‘Wheeler-Kenyon’ method.
She also used radiocarbon 14c to date wood, grains, and other organic remains, as well as using comparative artefactual studies.
Garstang had used the old method of ‘trenching’, which was inferior and caused a great deal of damage to a site.
How does absence negate Garstang's conclusions ? Why should it ?
Pottery was a major part of near eastern life. When pottery is referred to by archaeologists it includes every clay/ceramic artefact such as cooking pots, storage jars, jugs, water jars, burial urn even figurines and other ornamental items, pot sherds (ostraca) were even written on as they were easier to get hold of than papyrus. You can see it was such a large part of everyday life that not to find any associated with a particular era casts doubts on occupation. Every level of occupation yields pottery samples as it was such a large part of everyday life, but the absence of LBA pottery wasn’t the only argument that Kenyon used.
Why should the second wave of archaeology be allowed to dismiss the first goers ?
Scientific techniques usually improve over time, and you also have the added advantage of having more artefacts from other excavations for comparative studies. Kenyon’s new method was far superior to the trenching of earlier archaeologists.
From the same link:
These statements represent the conflicting messages that characterize the field of archaeology. In Albright’s era, archaeologists’ interpretations of field excavations ordinarily corroborated biblical information. It was common for prominent archaeologists such as Nelson Glueck to confidently affirm: ...no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference (1959, p. 31).
This is a great example of why these ‘biblical archaeologists’ finds ‘corroborated’ biblical information, it only corroborated it because they reinterpreted the biblical text to fit the evidence. Glueck’s quote is all over the Net, despite the fact that he retracted it in the revised edition of his book entitled
The River Jordan. I haven’t been able to get a copy of Glueck’s book, but Moorey includes a small section on Glueck’s quote:
When Glueck claimed that ‘it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference’, Finkelstein simply cited the archaeological problems at Jericho. . The charge that biblical archaeologists could be neither objective nor properly scientific was one that Wright was thereafter to wrestle with to the end of his life in 1974, whilst Glueck in the revised edition of ‘The River Jordan (1968) inserted a fresh section specifically rejecting any idea of ‘archaeological proofs’ of the Bible. {Moorey, P R S. 1991
A Century of Biblical Archaeology The Lutterworth Press, Cambridge.
A good example of this reinterpreting the Bible to fit the archaeological evidence can be found in Gueck’s best known work, the work done in the region of Edom and Moab. Now remember that the Bible claims a c. 1446 BCE date for the Exodus, and remember how the Israelites had some trouble with the Edomites and the Moablites, well Glueck concluded that the Israelites could not have met the Edomites or the Moabites as there was no Edomite or Moabites to meet before the 13th century BCE.
From Glueck’s article in BASOR
55 (1934)
‘Explorations in eastern Palestine and the Negeb. page 16:
’Had the Exodus through southern Transjordan taken place before the thirteenth century BC, the Israelites would have found neither Edomites and Moabites who would have given or withheld permission to traverse their territories’.
I haven’t read Glueck’s opinion of the dating of Jericho, but since he placed the Exodus in the 13th century BCE then it
has to be later than this date.
It is interesting that the author of this essay cited a quote from an archaeologist that he believes supports the reliability of the biblical record, he then cites 1 Kings 6:1 that claims a 1447 BCE Exodus and a 1407 conquest, yet the archaeolgist he quotes believed that the Conquest was at least 150 years after the Bible claims it was. I do not think that the author has done his homework very well.
ANother example of this author's poor grasp of the subject can be found in this statement:
Subsequently, scholars have critiqued Kenyon’s work and have vindicated the conclusions of Garstang, and, by implication, the biblical chronology.
He cites Bryant Wood's Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence, Biblical Archaeology Review, 16[2]:45-57, March/April, as a scholar who has vindicated the conclusions of Garstang.
If I inform you WT that Wood is an ultra-fundamentalist Christian then you know to be extra careful when examining his claims. Wood's work was ripped to shreds after it was published because of his very poor use of the sources and his amateur approach. He is editor of the magazine 'Bible and Spade' you can guess how objective he is. But here is some proof of Wood's embarrassing claims.
From James Weinstein
Exodus and Archaeological Reality in
Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence Frerichs and Lesko (eds), Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake. pp.87-103.
The effort by some scholars to transfer the date of the Exodus from the 13th century BC back to the late 15th century is even more inupportable on archaeological grounds. This earlier date maintains biblical linkage to the Exodus by relating the alleged event to the reference in 1 Kings 6 to the Exodus haveing taken place 480 years prior to the start of the construction of the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem. Recent champions of this theory include John Bimson and Bryant Wood. Bimson's efforts to date the destructions of Middle Bronze Age towns to the late 15th century BC are flawed by a host of Egyptological, stratigraphic and chronological problems, and to date, no Syro-Palestinian archaeologists or Egyptologists have accepted his chronological and historical analysis of the data. As for Wood, his argument is based on a redating of the destruction at Jericho from the 16th century BC to the end of the 15th century BC and suffers from a number of serious deficiencies in the interpretation of the archaeological and radiocarbin evidence.
Weistein highlights specific problems with Wood's claims:
The alleged evidence for the redating that Wood relies on includes the pottery associated with the 'Middle Bronze Age' destruction debris, a single radiocarbon date (BM-1790) from the destruction, and the presence of a cartouche plaque of Tuthmosis III, and a scarab of Hatshepsut in tomb 5 of Garstang's earlier excavations at the site.
An unfortunate flaw in Wood's argumentis in his use of a radiocarbon assay that the British Museum laboratoryhad already identified as being part of a large series of systematically defective dates. The revised radiocarbon age for this sample is 220 years earlier than the one cited in the original excavation report and used by Wood, and, when calibrated and turned into a calendrical date, is completely consistent with a traditional dating for the Middle Bronze II remains at Jericho. In any event, it is unacceptable to employ a single radiocarbon assay, without even taking into account the date's standard deviation, for the precise dating of an archaeological event.
A second major problem is Wood's failure to understand that the presence of a few royal-name seals in a single tomb is hardly adequate evidence to postulate a significant and continuous occupation on the mound itself in the 15th century BC. His view that the context of the Hatshepsut scarab should be contemporary with that of the pharaoh's reign because a scarab containing her name would not be kept as an heirloom is incorrect. There are at least two other scarabs from Palestine that name Hatshepsut, one comes from a 13th century BC level at Beth-Shan, the other may have been a surface find at Tel Yitzhaqi.
In any event, the recent publication of a series of high-precision radiocarbon dates of short-lived samples from the MB IIC destruction phase (H.J. Bruins and J. van der Plicht, 'The Exodus Enigma', Nature 382 (1996) pp 213-214) renders the argumnet moot. These assays consistently and strongly support a 16th century BC date for the end of the MB BC Jericho and cannot be reconciled with a late 15th century BC destruction.
Wood's researched is taitned by his extreme fundamentalism,and is often embarrassing. Christiananswers.net have a lot of his work on their site, you should read some of it, it is hilarious. But just like any other fundy, truth is not high on his list of priorities.
Hence, an "a priori" anti-supernatural bias pursued. The first wave was innocent and not contaminated with refutation objectives.
The first wave was not innocent, the first wave was extremely biased towards the Bible. This is what the whole debate centres on, the ‘archaeologists’ of the pre 70’s era interpreted every find by comparing it to the biblical text, they never examined any artefact independent of the Bible. Also, if you want to use the tumbling of Jericho’s walls as a supernatural event, then this would still have to leave evidence somewhere, but there is none.
Finally, regardless of the date for Jericho in this cited essay, it still doesn’t tackle the problem of Ai.
Catch you later,
Brian.
This message has been edited by Brian, 05-27-2004 05:59 AM
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