661 Archaeology
The change could be explained with the fact that
rich Romans owned estates in Arcadia. Arcadia in-
fluenced the legends and Ionic epos: Odysseus can
be regarded as hypostasis of Poseidon who was
worshipped in Mantineia. Penelope can be derived
from the old Peloponnesian deity called Artemis.
Bibliography: ■ C. Callmer, Studien zur Geschichte Arkadiens
(Lund 1943). ■ C. Lienau et al., “Arkades, Arkadia,” DNP 2
(Stuttgart 1997). ■ H. M. Stenger, Im Zeichen des Hirten und
des Lammes (Innsbruck/Vienna 22002).
Beate Kowalski
Archaeological Dating Techniques
/Dating Techniques in Archaeology
Archaeological Institute of America
The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) was
founded in 1879, making it the oldest archaeologi-
cal organization in the United States. The AIA is
primarily focused on classical archaeology and has
supported and helped to publicize the results of ex-
cavations at NT sites such as Corinth, Philippi, and
the Athenian Agora in its scholarly journal, The
American Journal of Archaeology. In recent years the
interest of the AIA has broadened and this is re-
flected in the range of articles published in its pop-
ular journal Archaeology. In 1900, the AIA with the
American Oriental Society and the Society of Bibli-
cal Literature jointly founded the American Schools
of Oriental Research (ASOR).
Thomas W. Davis
See also /Institutes and Schools of Archaeology
Archaeology
1. History of Archaeology in Bible Lands. Bibli-
cal Archaeology is related to a variety of disciplines
but has always maintained its own unique scholarly
character. The archaeology of Mesopotamia and, to
a lesser extent, Egypt has influenced the field but
Egyptology and Near Eastern studies trace their or-
igins to different historical moments that shaped
their development.
Western interest in Ancient Egypt was stimu-
lated by the Description d’Égypte, that remarkable
multi-volume work produced by scholars accompa-
nying Napoleon’s expedition. Under Ottoman rule,
Egypt had become a largely inaccessible backwater
and its marvelous antiquities were left to deterio-
rate and gradually disappear under a constant bar-
rage of windblown sand. The Napoleonic project
provided a detailed, if somewhat romanticized,
record of the state of Egyptian antiquities in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries as well as many
of the features of Egyptian architecture that had
been lost to the West (Jeffreys: 4; Scham 2003: 173).
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662
The major discovery that resulted from the Na-
poleonic Egyptian expedition (1798–1801) was that
of the Rosetta Stone, with its inscriptions in Greek,
Demotic and hieroglyphics. Jean-François Cham-
pollion, armed with knowledge of two of the three
languages on the stone (his teacher, Silvestre de
Sacy had made some headway with the Demotic
script) was able to definitively translate the hiero-
glyphs opening up an entire world of Ancient
Egyptian documents to scholars (Bahn: 68–69).
In a similar fashion, Mesopotamia was “discov-
ered” by Claudius Rich (1787–1820) of the East In-
dia Company – the corporation that launched a
thousand colonies. Rich’s explorations of ancient
Near Eastern culture from his post in Baghdad in-
spired a deep and abiding interest in Near Eastern
antiquities on the part of his fellow British coun-
trymen and their arch-rivals the Germans and the
French. One East India Company veteran who fol-
lowed in Rich’s footsteps was Henry Creswicke
Rawlinson (1810–1895) who, aided by the work
less adventurous epigraphers Georg Grotefend, Eu-
gène Burnouf, Christian Lassen and his brother
George Rawlinson deciphered the cuneiform on the
trilingual Behistun Inscription in 1837 (Maisels:
43–47).
What accompanied these years of great discov-
eries in both Egypt and Mesopotamia was an un-
regulated free-for-all gathering of antiquities in
various European capitals that has shaped the atti-
tudes and laws of modern nations occupying these
regions toward foreign excavations (Bahn: 67–73).
This process might have begun with circus per-
former Giovanni Belzoni whose “exports” of Egyp-
tian antiquities to the British Museum in London
began in 1810 (Fagan 1992). Later, Paul Émile
Botta (1802–1870) who served as the French consul
at Mosul sent countless treasures from Nineveh and
Khorsabad to the Louvre a practice continued by
his colleague Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894)
who uprooted and sent to the British Museum
many Assyrian reliefs, texts, and sculpture from
Nineveh (Maisels: 37–45).
While 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, exploration of sites
in the Southern Levant were much more directly
tied to an enlightenment-inspired belief, that came
to fruition in the late 19th century, that the biblical
text could be proven scientifically. Knowledge in
Europe and the United States about this part of the
world before Napoleon had come primarily from
the accounts of Crusaders and the Christian pil-
grims who had been visiting the region since the
4th century. Edward Robinson (1794–1863), an
American scholar, may have been the first to pub-
lish the results of his search for the Bible in the
Levant (1841) (Silberman 1998) but in the succeed-
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663 Archaeology
ing decades the Holy Land was mapped extensively
partly with the aim of finding individual biblical
sites but also as a result of that great Victorian ex-
plorer ethic that inspired adventurers like Burton,
Kitchener and “Chinese” Gordon among others
(Bar-Yosef 2005).
Many of these intrepid explorers were sup-
ported by the Palestine Exploration Fund which
had begun its mapping of the Holy Land as early
as 1865. The German (1877), the French (1890), the
American (1900), and the British (1919) all followed
suit with religiously affiliated research institutions
in the succeeding decades (Moscrop). The shift from
a geographical focus on finding sites to an archaeo-
logical one on recovering information from them
cannot be said to have pre-dated the very influen-
tial work of W. Flinders Petrie (1853–1942). To-
ward the end of the 19th century, Petrie had al-
ready made a significant advance in the
archaeology of the region with his method of estab-
lishing relative chronologies through careful strati-
graphic methods and the use of pottery typologies
(cf. “Methods” below).
In the latter part of the 19th century, a subtle
shift began to take place in both the European and
American schools. The beginnings of this change
may have come with the discoveries of the Mesha
Stele, by the Rev. F. A. Klein, a German missionary,
in 1868 and the Siloam Tunnel Inscription, by Con-
rad Schick in 1880, Petrie’s recovery of the Tell el-
Amarna letters, first discovered by local Egyptians
around 1887, and augmented by Petrie’s further
discoveries in 1892 and the Merneptah Stele, con-
taining the famous victory hymn for the Pharaoh’s
campaign in Canaan with the very earliest mention
of the word “Israel,” in 1896 was followed not long
after by that of the Law Code of Hammurabi in
1902 (Moorey: 40–48).
The increased excitement in biblical circles over
finds of ancient Near Eastern documents that re-
lated to the Bible culminated in a different ap-
proach to archaeology centered on extra-biblical
texts in addition to the biblical one. Partly moti-
vated by a desire to use archaeology to counter the
growing acceptance in scholarly circles of the
“higher criticism” of Wellhausen and others, tex-
tual archaeologists, those who specialized in epig-
raphy but also performed fieldwork, began to come
forward. Among the first of these were Charles Si-
mon Clermont-Ganneau (1846–1923) and Archi-
bald Henry Sayce (1846–1933) (Moorey: 25–39).
The establishment of a new generation of field ar-
chaeologists with a background in ancient Semitic
languages, however, culminated with the work of
William Foxwell Albright (1891–1971).
After World War I, Biblical Archaeology was
more or less dominated by Albright, an American
Scholar who, with his colleagues, continued in the
tradition of systematic excavation and interpreta-
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664
tion begun by Petrie. Albright also put his own
stamp on the practice of archaeology by seriously
questioning the automatic association of every site
discovered in Palestine with the biblical text and
confirming the authenticity of documents recov-
ered outside of archaeological contexts – most no-
tably the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although he was, him-
self, a strong believer in the historicity of the Bible,
his views were not fundamentalist. Arguing from
interpretations of the text, alongside of the
archaeological evidence and material that he was
able to decipher from ancient inscriptions, he
found compelling reasons to believe that the patri-
archs were real historical personages and that the
Israelite conquest of Canaan had actually taken
place (Silberman 1993).
In this post-World War I period, the American
school, led by Albright, to all appearances, eclipsed
the European institutions. Nevertheless, the Brit-
ish, the Germans and the French were still very ac-
tively engaged in excavation projects. The École Bib-
lique, founded and directed by the Dominican order
of the Catholic Church took its present name in
1920 and achieved a general recognition as the
French national archaeological school. Among its
most famous members were Marie-Emile Bois-
mard, Roland de Vaux, Raymond-Jacques Tournay
and Pierre Benoit. The German Society for the Ex-
ploration of Palestine (Deutscher Palästina-Verein) was
associated with a number of important discoveries
and projects including the excavations at Megiddo
by Gottlieb Schumacher, which were first pub-
lished by the society (Dever 1980: 40–44).
While foreign institutions, benefiting from ac-
cess to funding from abroad, may have dominated
archaeology between the wars, there was an indige-
nous archaeological tradition that developed along-
side. In 1914, Nahum Slouschz founded Society for
the Reclamation of Antiquities which, in 1920, be-
came the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society and,
later, the Israel Exploration Society. The Society’s
projects between 1921 and 1948 include investiga-
tions at Hammat-Tiberias, Absalom’s Tomb, Jeru-
salem’s Jewish Quarter, Ramat Rahel, Beth-Shearim
and Beth-Yerah. Jewish involvement in Holy Land
archaeology was heightened with the establish-
ment of the Archaeology Department at the He-
brew University of Jerusalem in 1934, under the
directorship of E. L. Sukenik (Fine: 23–24).
The American and European archaeological es-
tablishment is less aware of the work of Palestinian
Arab archaeologists during this period but the con-
tributions of scholars like Tawfiq Canaan (1882–
1964), Dimitri C. Baramki (1909–1984) and Ste-
phan Hanna Stephan are considerable. Canaan, per-
haps the best known of the three, was by training
a physician but he had a long-standing interest in
archaeology and accompanied one of the earlier ex-
peditions to Petra. Baramki worked in Palestine un-
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665 Archaeology
til 1948, when he and his family fled to Lebanon
and he began teaching at the American University
in Beirut. In 1956 he introduced fieldwork into the
AUB curriculum by opening the university’s first
training site at Tell al-Ghassil in the Biqâ Valley.
Stephan was a self-taught archaeologist with a
strong interest, like Canaan and Baramki, in eth-
nography (Glock).
With the end of World War II and the develop-
ment of nation-states in the region, a new para-
digm in the archaeology of the Holy Land devel-
oped. Israeli Archaeology, though it is often seen as
an adjunct to Bible studies, developed as a separate
discipline, albeit one that was built on the work of
previous scholars, most especially Albright. As Is-
rael began to train an increasing number of schol-
ars, their affect upon the practice of Biblical
Archaeology grew significantly. Among the promi-
nent Israelis directing work on biblical sites in the
1950s and 1960s were Yigael Yadin (Hazor, Beth
Shean, and Megiddo), Yohanan Aharoni (Arad,
Beersheba, and Lachish), Benjamin Mazar (Jeru-
salem and En Gedi), Ruth Amiran (Arad), Avraham
Biran (Dan), David Ussishkin (Beth Yerah), Moshe
Kochavi (Aphek) and Nahum Avigad (Jewish Quar-
ter) (Kletter).
Foreign excavators were still common in Israel,
the Palestinian Authority and Jordan, the nuclei of
biblical cultures. During this period they worked
more and more with indigenous archaeologists, in
some cases for the first time. Among the most
prominent American and European excavators of
the 1950s and 1960s were Kathleen Kenyon (Jeri-
cho and the City of David), James Pritchard (Gi-
beon), H. J. Franken (Deir Alla), A. D. Tushingham
(Jerusalem and Dibon), Siegfried Horn (Heshbon),
Crystal Bennett (Edomite sites) and Albright proté-
gés William G. Dever and G. Ernest Wright (Gezer)
(Mazar: 16–20).
2. Biblical Archaeology Today. Today, the archae-
ology of Bible Lands is still much involved with
biblically derived issues particularly because public
and media interest in the region center on how
sites and artifacts either support or refute the bibli-
cal text. Not atypically, academic trends are not
precisely in line with popular ones. In academia,
training in Biblical Archaeology, as opposed to
archaeology in general, is becoming a thing of the
past with some few religious institutions still
maintaining a specific program in it (Silberman
1998). In most institutions in the United States and
Europe, as well as in the Levant itself, the Bible
Lands have become a region of study much like any
other. As a consequence, the Southern Levant, as a
crossroads of ancient cultures, is quickly develop-
ing into a crossroads of archaeological ones.
Scholars with a variety of different backgrounds
are now being drawn to work in what was once
labeled “Bible territory.” Classical Archaeologists,
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666
for example, have become increasingly attracted to
the region’s spectacular Greco-Roman sites like Jer-
ash and Beth Shean. The journal of the Classically-
oriented Archaeological Institute of America now
publishes regular archaeological updates on Middle
Eastern countries. Traditional Near Eastern special-
ists, who once concentrated their efforts on sites in
Iraq and Syria, are finding the region of the biblical
heartland more relevant to their work than before
with articles and reviews on Southern Levantine
sites appearing in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies
and the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
Though Classical and Near Eastern archaeolo-
gists have found themselves to be quite comforta-
ble working in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian
Authority, one group that is still underrepresented
is that of anthropological archaeologists. Anthro-
pologists 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. The revolution in an-
thropological and social archaeology that took
place in the United States and England during the
1970s only influenced the archaeology of biblical
sites insofar as the incorporation of information
technology, geology, environmental archaeology
and archaeobotany and archaeozoology was con-
cerned. The postprocessual archaeological move-
ment in America and Europe that began in the late
eighties, however, probably due to its strong em-
phasis on looking at alternative views of the past
and critiquing nationalist and religio-centric prac-
tices, has never been a popular approach in the re-
gion (Scham 2002; Hodder 2002).
After more than 100 years of Biblical Archaeol-
ogy, the number of sites that can be directly related
to the biblical text are still few in number. Among
them are sites like the pool at Gibeon, Hezekiah’s
tunnel under Jerusalem, the siege ramp of the As-
syrian emperor Sennacherib at Lachish and walls of
the Herodian temple still standing in Jerusalem, all
of which were known to exist before any archaeo-
logical work was undertaken at the sites (Moorey:
14–24). Finds that have been uncovered at sites like
Jericho, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, Bethel, Beersheba,
and Arad have done much to explicate life in
Bronze and Iron Age Palestine but little to confirm
biblical events that were purported to have taken
place there. Certain finds of the past that were con-
sidered by excavators to offer valid evidence for the
historicity of biblical passages, like the famed “Sol-
omonic Gates” and casemate walls of Gezer, Me-
giddo, and Hazor, have recently been questioned
by Finkelstein as chronologically unsupportable
(Finkelstein/Silberman 2001). The consensus of
opinion appears to be in favor of the earlier inter-
pretations but subsequent generations of scholars
may yet disregard them.
Inscriptions, papyri and scrolls continue to be
the most celebrated archaeological discoveries in
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667 Archaeology
Bible Lands although, in comparison to Mesopota-
mia and Egypt, these are few. Killebrew (2005: 93)
has noted that, for a region that is credited with
the origins of the alphabet, few archaeological ex-
amples of writing have been recovered. First and
foremost among those that relate to the biblical
texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls mentioned above and
the Nag Hammadi codices, texts of the gnostic gos-
pels found in Egypt in 1945. Other lesser known
materials include the Balaam inscription found at
Deir Alla relating to “Balaam the Seer” mentioned
in Num 22–24, the Gezer Calendar with an early
Hebrew inscription, another early Hebrew inscrip-
tion from Izbet Sartah, the Lachish Letters depict-
ing conditions during the end of the 7th century
BCE shortly before the Babylonian conquest, the
Arad Ostraca from the Iron Age referring to the
temple in Jerusalem, the Ekron inscription men-
tioning Philistine kings referred to in the Bible, the
Pilate inscription found in Caesarea confirming the
existence of Pontius Pilate, an Aramaic inscription
from 8th century BCE. Tel Dan referring to the
“House of David,” the Samaria Ostraca detailing
facts about the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel and the
earliest incidence found to date of an undisputed
biblical text and the 8th-century BCE Ketef Hin-
nom Amulet, which contains the “priestly bless-
ing” from the book of Numbers (Smelik/Davis).
A number of archaeologists who still identify
with Biblical Archaeology have found themselves
embroiled in a modern controversy that pits so-
called “minimalists,” who supposedly refute the
historicity of the biblical text entirely, against
“maximalists,” who purportedly believe that the
Bible is generally accurate and that subsequent
archaeological finds will only serve to confirm it.
Perhaps the origins of this debate may stretch back
to Wellhausen but it has taken on a more complex
character today in the advent of new archaeological
finds (Finkelstein/Silberman 2006: 261–65). Wil-
liam G. Dever, for example rejects being character-
ized as a Biblical Archaeologist preferring the ad-
jective “Syro-Palestinian” but resolutely defends
the historicity of the biblical narrative with respect
to Iron Age Israel. Dever and the majority of his
colleagues, however, point out that excavations
have not provided a complete picture – and, in-
deed, cannot given the limitations of archaeology
(Dever 1990, 1997 and 2001).
Minimalists are represented, in particular, by a
group of scholars, mostly historians rather than ar-
chaeologists, labeled as “the Copenhagen School.”
To varying degrees, they disregard the Bible as his-
tory on the basis of, among other things, the lack of
archaeological evidence. These individuals include,
Whitelam (1997), Lemche (1998), and Thompson
(1999). With respect to Whitelam and Thompson,
these views represent more of a reaction against Is-
raeli Nationalist Archaeology than Biblical Archae-
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668
ology. The latter, of course, is partially predicated
on the biblical Israelite narrative but, in general,
Israeli interest in biblical sites is rooted more in
historical geography than in the text.
Ultimately, it is unlikely that Biblical Archaeol-
ogy or Israeli Archaeology can be divorced from its
primary basis of relevance to the rest of the world
as well as to its own history and development. For
most scholars working on Bronze and Iron Age
sites, the text can still be mined for reliable clues
to past cultures although its utility as a basis for
deciding questions about historical events may be
limited. The historicity questions, rather than be-
ing resolved, will more likely undergo a fundamen-
tal change in the future. Thus, queries like “Can a
‘history of Israel’ be written?” might well metamor-
phose into a more scholarly approach that asks, in-
stead, “Is there any way in which the biblical text
can be used to tell us something real about the
past?” (Scham 2002).
3. Methods in the Archaeology of Bible Lands.
Work in Bible Lands has contributed more to the
development of archaeological methodology in
general than is often acknowledged. Petrie devel-
oped his system of constructing chronological se-
quences based upon pottery recovered from differ-
ent strata of an archaeological site as a consequence
of his work in Egypt and Palestine. There was very
little interest in pottery by his contemporaries but
versions of his approach found their way into the
practice of archaeology globally. Albright’s method
of interpreting and incorporating historical resour-
ces into the study of artifacts and sites has become
a part of historical archaeological approaches
worldwide. Albright brought together biblical,
Near Eastern, historical and archaeological scholar-
ship in a way that had never been accomplished by
previous researchers (Davis 2004a: 20–28).
Albright’s broad interest in reconstructing the
biblical world was based less upon his own research
than on archaeological data retrieved by others –
scores of whom consulted with him regularly be-
fore interpreting their finds. Albright, however,
was not necessarily an innovator insofar as field-
work was concerned except with respect to his se-
lection of sites. Although he was one of the few
archaeologists working between the wars who dis-
played an interest in some of the smaller tell sites
of Palestine, his excavation methodology was pretty
much the same as that used by other Near Eastern
archaeologists at the time. The traditional tech-
nique 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 inter-
ested in defining the plans of monumental build-
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669 Archaeology
ings like palaces, temples and fortifications. It is
also of value for sites that will be presented to the
public (Mazar: 12–16).
In excavations at Jericho and the City of David
in the 1950s and 1960s, Kathleen Kenyon intro-
duced an alternative practice. The so-called
Wheeler-Kenyon (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 Albright-Wright 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 com-
plete chronological sequence for the site (Holladay).
Today few excavators are dedicated to a doctri-
naire 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 sal-
vage or “rescue” archaeology and surveys – both
of them driven by the rapid pace of industrial and
residential development in these countries. In the
United States and Europe, this kind of archaeology
is generally undertaken in advance of building pro-
jects. In the Southern Levant this is the case as well
but constant political instability has added a new
dimension of recovering material from destroyed
sites. An example of this occurred with downtown
Beirut where bombing and destruction has demol-
ished some buildings but exposed other, earlier oc-
cupations. The erstwhile salvage excavation by in-
ternational teams actually became one of the
largest in the world uncovering the remains of
early Byzantine, Hellenistic, Bronze Age, and Early
Iron Age Phoenician cities (Naccache).
Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority are
known for the large numbers of caves that have
been occupied from early prehistory until Roman
times. Thus, cave survey and excavation are impor-
tant parts of archaeological practice in the region.
Caves present special problems and challenges in-
cluding safety hazards, obstacles and difficult
working conditions. Biblical Archaeologists are
particularly interested in those cave sites where
scrolls and other written materials have been
found, including the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. Cave
excavations require highly specialised techniques
and many caves were destroyed by looting and care-
less excavation in the past. Full archaeological in-
vestigations of caves can be painstakingly slow – a
cave floor can build up a complicated stratigraphy
with deposits going back many thousands of years
(Latham).
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In addition to cave sites, underwater sites have
become a standard focus for research in the region.
In places like Caesarea, Atlit Yam and Dor, divers
have been working for many years to recover
archaeological material. Once the site is cleared, a
reference grid is installed, usually constructed from
nylon cables or PVC tubing, creating lattices of two
or four meters square within which divers recover
and record artifacts. Underwater archaeological re-
search in Israel began in the early 1960s and inten-
sive archaeological activities which have been car-
ried out in over 40 years of research have yielded
valuable information about the ancient popula-
tions of the southern Levantine coasts. Sites that
have been discovered and “excavated” by underwa-
ter archaeologists, include submerged prehistoric
settlements, coastal settlements, shipwrecks, ports
and anchorages, and rock-cut installations like
quarries and channels (Wachsmann/Davis).
4. Problems of Modern Archaeology in Bible
Lands. In few places in the world is the distant past
given such immediacy as in the Holy Land. The as-
sociation of the region’s history with three of the
world’s primary religious traditions, as well as the
fact that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948
was partially predicated on biblical history, has
made it the object of deeply held beliefs and con-
tentions. Israel’s opening of an ancient tunnel in
the city near Haram al-Sharif prompted riots in Sep-
tember 1996 and building activities of the Muslim
authorities controlling the Haram starting in 2000
have been highly criticized by Jews who recognize
the site as the location of the Temple Mount.
Archaeological digs have also provoked violent con-
frontations between Jews in Israel over archaeologi-
cal digs in areas deemed to be ancient Jewish ceme-
teries (Scham 1998 and 2001).
Despite the public’s interest, and sometimes in-
terference, in the activities of archaeologists, how-
ever, it can be said that the driving force in Holy
Land archaeology today is not ideology but eco-
nomics. The budgets for the maintenance of
archaeological sites and for new excavations are of-
ten highly dependent upon tourism (Kletter). The
competition for tourist dollars throughout the re-
gion often results in finds related to the NT, and
secondarily the OT, being subjected to a high level
of media attention before there has been much of
an opportunity for archaeologists to evaluate these
finds (Scham 2004). The publicity surrounding the
so-called “Cave of John the Baptist” and “Herod’s
Tomb” are examples. These actions are simple to
understand in the context of economic realities.
Christians continue to come to the region, regard-
less of the security situation. The constructive side
of Christian archaeology is that it doesn’t represent
the heritage of the majority on either side of the
current conflict in the region and is therefore less
contentious. The destructive aspect has to do with
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671 Archaeology
the amount of resources now being devoted to one
limited period of time in a region that has many
significant time periods to be explored.
Finally, it must be said that the region’s major
archaeological concerns are those that it shares
with countries around the world – that is, protect-
ing sites from destruction, either natural or man-
made. Sites left to the elements have been a fact
of archaeological practice in Israel, Jordan and the
Palestinian Authority for many years. Important
biblical places like Gezer, Lachish, and Aphek have
received little attention because they have not been
considered interesting to the public or to tourists.
In the West Bank (the Palestinian Authority) sites
like Bethel, Gibeon and Samaria suffer from a lack
of accessibility and a scarcity of resources. In Jor-
dan, which has fewer sites of biblical interest, ef-
forts have been based primarily on the availability
of outside funding. Nevertheless, antiquities au-
thorities in recent years have been much involved
in efforts to require that at least foreign excavators
devote some resources to preservation (Kletter).
Development, looting, and political instability
are the major factors adversely affecting the
archaeological heritage of this region. Certainly the
last has much to do with exacerbating the first two
factors. In Jordan, due to that country’s relative
calm in a region of constant conflagration, building
booms as conflict elsewhere increases. In Israel, the
Palestinian Authority and Lebanon, while the at-
tention of authorities is diverted to security mat-
ters, looters activities proliferate. Looting for most
in the region is a crime of opportunity. Studies
have indicated that for the individual who takes
the risk of stealing antiquities the rewards are
lower than for dealers. Israel has, in the past, had
relatively lenient laws regulating the antiquities
market but this situation is changing. Jordan’s laws
are more stringent but enforcement is lacking due
to the small budget allocated to this activity. The
Palestinian Authority has had scant opportunity to
develop much in the way of a functioning bureauc-
racy to deal with these problems and unemploy-
ment there is at an all time high (Yahya).
What is the future of archaeology in Bible
Lands? One can envision the continuance of a kind
of economically-driven approaches. Certainly, all
the countries in the region need tourist revenues
from biblical sites within their jurisdiction but ar-
chaeologists in this region have come to the conclu-
sion that local community involvement in sites is
the key to their survival. In the context of the cur-
rent unrest in the region, however, this conclusion
may have come too late to save many sites.
Bibliography: ■ N. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground (Chicago
2001). ■ Y. Aharoni, The Land of the Bible (Philadelphia
1979). ■ W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine (Balti-
more 1960). ■ R. Amiran, Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land
(New Brunswick 1980). ■ P. Bahn (ed.), The Cambridge Illus-
trated History of Archaeology (Cambridge 1999). ■ E. Bar-
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Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception 2 (© Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York 2009)
672
Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917 (Oxford
2005). ■ O. Bar-Yosef, “Prehistory of the Levant,” Annual
Review of Anthropology (1980) 101–33. ■ A. Ben-Tor (ed.),
The Archaeology of Ancient Israel (New Haven 1992). ■ A. Bi-
ran, Biblical Dan (Jerusalem 1994). ■ F. J. Bliss, The Develop-
ment of Palestine Exploration (New York 1906). ■ G. Corn-
feld/D. N. Freedman (eds.), Archaeology of the Bible (San
Francisco 1976). ■ P. Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel”
(Sheffield 1992). ■ T. Davis, “Theory and Method in Bibli-
cal Archaeology,” in The Future of Biblical Archaeology (eds.
J. K. Hoffmeier/A. R. Millard; Grand Rapids, Mich. 2004a)
20–28. ■ T. Davis, Shifting Sands (New York 2004b).
■ W. G. Dever, “Archeological Method in Israel,” BA 34/1
(1980) 40–48. ■ W. G. Dever, Recent Archaeological Discoveries
and Biblical Research (Seattle 1990). ■ W. G. Dever, “Archae-
ology and the emergence of early Israel,” in Archaeology and
Biblical Interpretation (ed. J. R. Bartlett; London/New York
1997) 20–50. ■ W. G. Dever, “Archaeology, Ideology and
the Quest for an Ancient or Biblical Israel,” Near Eastern
Archaeology 61/1 (1998) 39–52. ■ W. G. Dever, What Did the
Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (Grand Rap-
ids, Mich. 2001). ■ T. Dothan, The Philistines and Their Ma-
terial Culture (New Haven 1982). ■ M. Drower, Flinders Pet-
rie (Madison, Wis. 1996). ■ B. Fagan, The Rape of the Nile
(Providence 1992). ■ B. Fagan, Peoples of the Earth (New
York 2005). ■ S. Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman
World (Cambridge 2005). ■ I. Finkelstein/N. Silberman,
The Bible Unearthed (New York 2001). ■ I. Finkelstein/N.
Silberman, David and Solomon (New York 2006). ■ H.
Franken, A Primer of Old Testament Archaeology (Leiden 1963).
■ A. Glock, “Cultural bias in archaeology,” in Archaeology,
History and Culture in Palestine and the Near East (ed. T. Kapi-
tan; Atlanta 1987) 324–42. ■ A. Glock, “Archaeology as
Cultural Survival,” in ibid., 302–23. ■ A. Glock, “Divided
We Stand,” in ibid., 343–65. ■ I. Hodder, “Ethics and
Archaeology: The Attempt at Catalhoyuk,” Near Eastern
Archaeology 65 (2002) 147–161. ■ I. Hodder/S. Hutson,
Reading the Past (Cambridge 2003). ■ J. K. Hoffmeier/A.
Millard (eds.), The Future of Biblical Archaeology (Grand Rap-
ids, Mich. 2004). ■ J. Holladay, “Method and Theory in
Syro-Palestinian Archaeology,” in Near Eastern Archaeology
(ed. S. Richard; Winona Lake, Ind. 2003) 33–45. ■ D. Jef-
freys, “Introduction: Two Hundred Years of Ancient
Egypt,” in Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte (ed.
id.; London 2003) 1–18. ■ K. Kenyon, The Bible and Recent
Archaeology (Atlanta 1987). ■ A. Killebrew, Biblical Peoples
and Ethnicity (Atlanta 2005). ■ R. Kletter, Just Past? (London
2005). ■ A. Latham, “Dating Methods,” Encyclopoedia of
Caves and Karst Science (New York 2004) 279–81. ■ A.
Latham, “Carmel Caves, Israel: Archaeology,” in ibid., 195–
98. ■ N. P. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition
(London 1998). ■ T. E. Levy (ed.), The Archaeology of Society
in the Holy Land (New York 1995). ■ J. Magness, The Archae-
ology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids 2003).
■ C. Maisels, The Near East (London 1993). ■ N. Masalha,
The Bible and Zionism (London 2007). ■ A. Mazar, Archaeol-
ogy of the Land of the Bible (Garden City, N.Y. 1990). ■ P. R. S.
Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology (Louisville, Ky.
1991). ■ J. Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem (New York 2000).
■ A. Naccache, “Beirut’s Memorycide,” in Archaeology Under
Fire (ed. L. Meskell; New York 1998) 140–58. ■ J. B. Prit-
chard, Gibeon (Princeton, N.J. 1962). ■ W. E. Rast, Through
the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology (Philadelphia 1992). ■ B.
Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age (London 2004). ■ S. Scham,
“Mediating nationalism in archaeology,” AmA 99/3 (1998):
371–79. ■ S. Scham, “A Fight Over Sacred Turf,” Arch. 54/
6 (2001) 62–67, 72–74. ■ S. Scham, “The Days of the
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673 Archippus
Judges,” JSOT 97 (2002) 37–64. ■ S. Scham, “Ancient
Egypt and the Archaeology of the Disenfranchised,” in
Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte (ed. D. Jeffreys;
London 2003) 171–77. ■ S. Scham, “‘From the River Unto
the Land of the Philistines’, in Deterritorializations (eds. M.
Dorrian/G. Rose; London/New York 2004) 73–79. ■ N. Sil-
berman, Digging for God and Country (New York 1982). ■ N.
Silberman, “Visions of the Future: Albright in Jerusalem,”
BA 55/1 (1993) 8–16. ■ N. Silberman, “Promised Lands
and Chosen Peoples,” in Nationalism, Politics and the Practice
of Archaeology (ed. P. L. Kohl; Cambridge 1995) 249–62.
■ N. Silberman, “American Biblical Archaeology,” in Archae-
ology Under Fire (ed. L. Meskell; New York 1998) 175–88.
■ K. Smelik/G. Davis, Writings from Ancient Israel (Herndon,
Va. 1999). ■ E. Stern (ed.), The New Encyclopedia of Archaeo-
logical Excavations in the Holy Land, 4 vols. (Jerusalem 1993).
■ T. L. Thompson, The Mythic Past (London 1999). ■ D. Uss-
ishkin, The Village of Silwan (Jerusalem 1993). ■ R. de Vaux,
Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (London 1973). ■ S.
Wachsmann/D. Davis, “Nautical Archaeology in Israel,” The
International Handbook of Underwater Archaeology (New York
2001) 499–518. ■ R. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory (Oxford
1999). ■ K. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel (Lon-
don 1997). ■ G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology (Philadelphia
1957). ■ Y. Yadin, Masada (New York 1966). ■ Y. Yadin,
Hazor (New York 1975). ■ A. Yahya, “Archaeology and Na-
tionalism in the Holy Land,” in Archaeologies of the Middle
East (ed. S. Pollock; Oxford 2005) 66–77.
Sandra Scham
Archangel
/Angels and Angel-Like Beings
Archelaus
The elder son of Herod the Great (ruled 37–4 BCE)
by his Samaritan wife Malthace, who ruled over Ju-
dea, Samaria and Idumea from 4 BCE until 6 CE.
Most of what we know concerning Archelaus comes
from the Jewish historian Josephus. Archelaus and
his full brother Antipas were educated in Rome.
Herod’s final will named Archelaus as his principal
successor, granting him the territories of Judea, Sa-
maria, and Idumea, and giving him the title
“king.” Before his claim was ratified by the Roman
emperor Augustus, anti-Herod forces rioted in Jer-
usalem during the Passover celebration. Archelaus
ordered the unrest to be violently suppressed, re-
sulting in the massacre of 3,000 Jews. Archelaus
went to Rome to plead his case before Augustus; his
brother Antipas contested Herod’s will, declaring
Archelaus unfit to rule. Meanwhile, a major revolt
broke out in Judea, which was brutally put down
by the Roman governor Varus. Varus allowed a del-
egation of Jews to sail to Rome to petition Augus-
tus to set aside Archelaus in favor of direct Roman
rule.
Augustus ratified Herod’s will and made Arche-
laus ruler of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea, as well
as the cities of Sebaste, Strabo’s Tower (Caesarea),
Joppa, and Jerusalem. Antipas was given the terri-
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674
tories of Galilee and Peraea, while their half-
brother Phillip became ruler of Gaulanitis, Tracho-
nitis, Batanaea, and Panaeas. However, Augustus
refused to grant Archelaus the title “king,” naming
him “ethnarch” instead. The title “Herod, Eth-
narch,” appears on Archelaus’ coins. During his
reign he founded a city named Archelais and re-
built the royal palace at Jericho. He was not a popu-
lar ruler, but rather was known for brutality. E.g.,
Matt 2 : 22 recounts that Joseph and Mary decide to
reside in Galilee under Antipas, rather than in Ju-
dea under Archelaus. Archelaus also aroused Jewish
religious wrath by marrying Glaphyra, the widow
of his half-brother Alexander, with whom she had
had children. In 6 CE Archelaus was summoned to
appear before Augustus in Rome; he was stripped
of his title and his wealth was confiscated. He was
exiled to Vienna in Gaul, where he presumably
died. Following his deposition, Judea and Samaria
were placed under direct Roman rule.
Bibliography: ■ Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book XVII (eds.
R. Marcus/H. St. J. Thackery; LCL 7; Cambridge, Mass./Lon-
don 1998).
Sidnie White Crawford
Archer
/Military Organization
Archi, Archites
The term “Archi” (MT Arkî) is used six times in
the Hebrew Bible: once as the southern limit of the
settlement of the Josephites (Josh 16 : 2) and five
times as the origin of Hushai, the counsellor of
King David (2 Sam 15 : 32; 16 : 16; 17 : 5.14; 1 Chr
27 : 33). Moreover, the gentilic name Arqî (Gen
10 : 17; 1 Chr 1 : 15) designates a Canaanite clan. Are
the two names – with a very different spelling –
expressions of the same reality? Probably not: the
first one is related to Benjamin, while the second
one is frequently associated with the Phoenician
coastal town of Irqata.
Jacques Vermeylen
Archippus
The third person greeted by name in the salutation
of the letter to Philemon is Archippus (Phlm 2). Ac-
cording to the majority of ancient and modern
commentators, he was a member of Philemon’s
household – perhaps even the son of the two per-
sons immediately mentioned before him, Philemon
and Apphia (Fitzmyer: 88). Nevertheless, the singu-
lar possessive pronoun “your” (σο$) in the follow-
ing phrase, “the church in your house,” admits a
different interpretation: In agreement with gram-
matical rules σο$ may refer to the nearest person
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