Margreet L . Steiner
I am a Near Eastern archaeologist with a special interest the archaeology of the Southern Levant. My research has focussed on the archaeology of Jerusalem, stratigraphical analysis, Iron Age pottery, Islamic glass bracelets, field work and the management of archaeology projects.
I am currently prepearing the pottery of three Iron Age sites in ancient Moab for publication: Khirbat al-Mudayna ath-Thamad, Shrine site 13 and Khirbat al-Lehun.
For Oxford University Press I am editing the Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant, together with Ann E. Killebrew.
From March 2012 onwards I will be co-directing the renewed excavations at Tell Abu Sarbut.
I am currently prepearing the pottery of three Iron Age sites in ancient Moab for publication: Khirbat al-Mudayna ath-Thamad, Shrine site 13 and Khirbat al-Lehun.
For Oxford University Press I am editing the Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant, together with Ann E. Killebrew.
From March 2012 onwards I will be co-directing the renewed excavations at Tell Abu Sarbut.
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And yet, from 1960 onwards history was being (re)written at Tell Deir Alla. To discover the secrets of the tell, the digging team defied cold, rain and stormy winds for months on end, sleeping in rattling tents and working long days on the tell and in the camp. And with success! An meticulous yet efficient excavation method was introduced, the already tenuous relationship between Bible and archaeology was further exacerbated, and the study of excavated pottery was given a scientific basis. The name Deir Alla became an international benchmark for modern scientific research, for prompt publication of the remarkable finds and for independent interpretation of the excavation results.
The story of the excavations at Tell Deir Alla in the 1960s have never been told in any detail, and the excavation results have mostly been published in scholarly books and journals which are difficult to access. This book hopes to remedy that. It recounts the story of the first ten years of the project, from 1959 when funding for the project was sought, until 1969 when the first report was published. The first section describes the organization of the project before the expeditions went out into the field. The second part takes the reader to the actual field work and describes the occupation history of the tell. The story is illustrated by numerous photographs and plans, many of which are being published for the first time.
This book is written to fill in this lacuna. It explores how the biblical texts depict the people inhabiting the Promised Land and the towns and temples they built. It also shows what archaeological research reveals of the land, its people and the ways they lived their lives. In an accessible way the book takes the reader to where archaeology and biblical texts meet and explains how to interpret the correspondences and differences.
This book does not set out to confirm the Bible, nor the opposite. It aims at exploring ancient texts as well as the results of dozens of years of archaeological research. Information is gleaned from royal inscriptions and mundane cooking pots, from heroic biblical stories and excavated shrines, from names mentioned in texts and pig bones in the ground. Together these sources allow us a deeper understanding of the people inhabiting the ancient land.
The book offers an exciting journey into modern archaeological and biblical research and sheds new light on the history of Ancient Israel and its neighbours.
Iron II
pottery was found. I will not try to discuss or summarize the enormous amount of information provided in the following chapters. What I want to do here is focus on some aspects that have not received much attention in the literature. These concern first the impact of the Assyrians (and later the Babylonians and Persians) on the material culture of the regions they dominated, and secondly the organization of the economy of the various states in the Levant.
Jerusalem
Susan Floyd Barnett
The long history of archaeological excavations in the city is not only closely related to and entangled with contemporary religious, social and political circumstances, but also offers tantalizing glimpses of the direction the discipline is taking.
At the moment a return to nineteenthcentury colonialist perspectives can be perceived. `Digging with bible and spade’ seems to have made a glorious comeback, and lip service is paid to the problematic nature of interweaving written texts and archaeological evidence. These are general trends in the archaeology of the Southern Levant, especially in regard to the Iron Age, although some counterbalance is offered here and
there.
most disputed areas in the Levant. And nowhere else is archaeology interlaced so intimately with politics.
This chapter focuses on the history of the archaeological excavations in the city and
discusses the increasingly difcult relationship between archaeology and politics in Jerusalem.
And yet, from 1960 onwards history was being (re)written at Tell Deir Alla. To discover the secrets of the tell, the digging team defied cold, rain and stormy winds for months on end, sleeping in rattling tents and working long days on the tell and in the camp. And with success! An meticulous yet efficient excavation method was introduced, the already tenuous relationship between Bible and archaeology was further exacerbated, and the study of excavated pottery was given a scientific basis. The name Deir Alla became an international benchmark for modern scientific research, for prompt publication of the remarkable finds and for independent interpretation of the excavation results.
The story of the excavations at Tell Deir Alla in the 1960s have never been told in any detail, and the excavation results have mostly been published in scholarly books and journals which are difficult to access. This book hopes to remedy that. It recounts the story of the first ten years of the project, from 1959 when funding for the project was sought, until 1969 when the first report was published. The first section describes the organization of the project before the expeditions went out into the field. The second part takes the reader to the actual field work and describes the occupation history of the tell. The story is illustrated by numerous photographs and plans, many of which are being published for the first time.
This book is written to fill in this lacuna. It explores how the biblical texts depict the people inhabiting the Promised Land and the towns and temples they built. It also shows what archaeological research reveals of the land, its people and the ways they lived their lives. In an accessible way the book takes the reader to where archaeology and biblical texts meet and explains how to interpret the correspondences and differences.
This book does not set out to confirm the Bible, nor the opposite. It aims at exploring ancient texts as well as the results of dozens of years of archaeological research. Information is gleaned from royal inscriptions and mundane cooking pots, from heroic biblical stories and excavated shrines, from names mentioned in texts and pig bones in the ground. Together these sources allow us a deeper understanding of the people inhabiting the ancient land.
The book offers an exciting journey into modern archaeological and biblical research and sheds new light on the history of Ancient Israel and its neighbours.
pottery was found. I will not try to discuss or summarize the enormous amount of information provided in the following chapters. What I want to do here is focus on some aspects that have not received much attention in the literature. These concern first the impact of the Assyrians (and later the Babylonians and Persians) on the material culture of the regions they dominated, and secondly the organization of the economy of the various states in the Levant.
Susan Floyd Barnett
The long history of archaeological excavations in the city is not only closely related to and entangled with contemporary religious, social and political circumstances, but also offers tantalizing glimpses of the direction the discipline is taking.
At the moment a return to nineteenthcentury colonialist perspectives can be perceived. `Digging with bible and spade’ seems to have made a glorious comeback, and lip service is paid to the problematic nature of interweaving written texts and archaeological evidence. These are general trends in the archaeology of the Southern Levant, especially in regard to the Iron Age, although some counterbalance is offered here and
there.
most disputed areas in the Levant. And nowhere else is archaeology interlaced so intimately with politics.
This chapter focuses on the history of the archaeological excavations in the city and
discusses the increasingly difcult relationship between archaeology and politics in Jerusalem.
1. the situation in Jerusalem in the Amarna period (fourteenth century B.C.E.);
2. the large stepped stone structure and earth-filled terraces underneath; and
3. the position of Jerusalem in the beginning of Iron II.
This essay will address these three topics of controversy and present my interpretations based on Kenyon’s excavations.
In Samaria a large trench was dicovered in the 1931-33/35 excavations, subsequently published by E.L. Sukenik as feature E 207. He describes a system of rock-cut trenches filled with an enormous amount of pottery sherds and figurines, which he interpreted as an `Israelite shrine' .
In her excavations in Jerusalem Kathleen Kenyon found a large cave also filled with broken pottery and figurines. Cave I, as she called it, was described in her book Digging Up Jerusalem and has recently been published more fully.
The striking similarity in repertoires and the possible relations between these two sites certainly deserves attention. As both sites fall outside the standard categories of temples, gateway cult places and `high places', they may reveal information on religious practices on which the scriptures do not elaborate, namely those of the common people. The aim of this paper is to to present the published evidence anew and to venture some thoughts on the function and meaning of these cult places.
This report focusses on some technological aspects of the pottery repertoire, a typology and a dating of the sherds. The corpus will be compared with published material from Central Jordan, in particular the sites of Tall Dayr `Alla in the Jordan Valley, Khirbat al-Lahun on the northern rim of the Wadi Mujib and Khirbat al-Mudayna al-`Aliya in the Karak region, as well as with the unpublished pottery from Mudayna Thamad that is currently being studied by the author, in an attempt to set the WT-13 pottery in the Central Jordanian tradition.
century AD). The building consisted of five rooms around a central courtyard. Many complete pottery vessels were retrieved, as well as limestone beakers, so-called Herodian lamps, terra sigillata sherds and fragments of glass vessels. The pottery repertoire was
simple and consisted of cooking pots, small bowls, and small and large jars. Several different types of cooking pots were found lying together on the floors. A large number of limestone beaker fragments was retrieved from these layers.
The excavations revealed that Tell Abu Sarbut was settled for the first time in the Late Hellenistic or Early Roman period when the Jordan Valley was used to produce food for the inhabitants of the Decapolis cities, especially Pella. A long sequence of walls and floors
from the Early Roman period has been uncovered. The settlement seems to have been abandoned due to an earthquake or large fire, as the uppermost floors were sealed with a thick layer of heavily burnt debris. Only in the Abbasid (eighth to tenth century) and the
Mamluk (thirteenth to sixteenth century) periods, the site was inhabited again.
Another region with many Jewish inhabitants, Perea across the Jordan, has as yet not yielded any of these traits. The renewed excavations of Tell Abu Sarbut in the eastern Jordan Valley may readily change this picture. What started as research into a local rural community from the third century AD, could now include the excavation of the remains of a Jewish community from the first centuries BC-AD. In Dutch