Field Methods and Retrieval Strategies in Israel-Palestine

The archaeologists in the Near East have long been preoccupied with chronology. The site reports in general, and pottery studies in particular, reflect this chronological interest. A simi-lar phenomenon has been described for Roman pottery by Peacock (1982: 1–4, 160–165; Ault

& Nevet 1999: 43–45). Documentation practices that were suitable for chronologically and culture-historically oriented work may be barren ground for socially oriented questions con-cerning the life ways of common people, their subsistence patterns, the production of their daily equipment, or space use in their homes. Retrieval and recording practices are a part of a larger system of field archaeology including excavation strategy, management, organization, storage, and many other aspects and practicalities. In order to set the work with finds in their proper context, a look at field methods is needed. However, the topic is broad and I will treat it here only on a general level. Field methods in Israel have been summarized by Kletter (2015).

Archaeological methods for excavating and recording have followed different paths in differ-ent regions around the world. This is also the case in the Levant – a region with a long history of excavations. Over the history of research in the region, there is a trend of recording more details, keeping more fragmentary finds, and excavating less cubic meters. This is well illus-trated at the sites with renewed excavation projects like Megiddo (Loud 1948; reports edited by Finkelstein et al. 2000, 2006 and 2013), Beth-Shean (Rowe 1940; Mazar 2006, reports ed-ited by Mazar et Mullins 2007; Mazar & Panitz-Cohen 2009), and Hazor (Yadin 1958, 1960;

Ben-Tor et al. 2012). This trend has been generally accepted. The recording and retrieval strat-egies have been the focus of only a few studies – which is surprising when one thinks of their importance for all materials under archaeological studies. Davis (2004) has provided a general overview on the field work and historical interpretation. In a short article on field work, Wright insightfully noted that “What excavators are trying to do and what they do are not identical and neither may mirror what they say they are doing” (Wright 1966: 115). Though he wrote about excavation methods, the same can be said of retrieval strategies as well.

Stratigraphic Excavation Traditions

There are two main traditions of stratigraphic excavation in Israel-Palestine: 1)the Architec-tural orhorizontal,so called “locus to stratum” method of the large excavations of the British Mandate stage of Palestinian archaeology common from the 1930s to 1950’s, and the 2) Wheeler-Kenyon, vertical or “earth to layer” system, used in Palestine from the 1950’s on.

Excavations in Israel have sometimes been considered as using the “Israeli system” of excava-tion, coined after Yohanan Aharoni’s article (1973). However, this system is not a distinctive method, but rather a tradition of combining architectural and stratigraphic excavation meth-ods (Kletter 2015). The excavations at Tel Kinrot also follow the tradition of combining these two methods.

In thearchitectural tradition, the strata or levels were defined by architecture and the focus of practical work was in exposing complete horizontal units (Loud 1948: 1; Ussishkin 2004: 40–

41). The method has also been called the “Locus to Stratum” method because the loci are the basic units. Architecturally connected loci, and loci with typologically similar finds, are consid-ered as representing the same stratum (Wright 1966: 120). ALocus would usually be a room or a courtyard of an architectural unit. This kind of tradition is exemplified by the excavation reports ofBeth-Shean I andII by Alan Rowe (1940 and 1930) orMegiddo I by Robert Lamon &

Geoffrey Shipton (1939) andMegiddo II by Gordon Loud (1948). The large scale excavations of William Albright in the early part of the 20^th century also belong to this tradition (e.g. Al-bright 1926). Later representatives of the horizontal method can be found in the work of Yigael Yadin at Tel Hazor and Yohanan Aharoni at Tel Beer-Sheba (Ussishkin 2004: 41, Bar-Yosef &

Mazar 1982: 314). These excavations aimed at large scale clearance of the Near Eastern tells stratum by stratum, originally even in their entirety (Lamon & Shipton 1939: xxiii). This was hampered by the financial limits of the

expeditions (Loud 1948: 1). In this tra-dition, locus numbers were assigned to structures or parts of them, leaving parts of the excavated materials out-side any loci. Thus not all finds could be assigned a definite locus: those were registered with a reference to a near-by locus or a square of excava-tion and a stratum (Lamon & Shipton 1939). The incomplete stratigraphic definition of the loci was to some ex-tent compensated for by the large amount of finds from these excava-tions (Bar-Yosef & Mazar 1982: 311).

The Wheeler-Kenyon or “vertical sys-tem” is the other influential tradition in Israel. It was developed by Morti-mer Wheeler in the 1930’s in Britain, and further refined by his student Kathleen Kenyon. Their work provided two fundamental ideas for strati-graphic work: the value of the inter-faces of the identified earth layers, and the numbering of all the layers.

The latter assures that all objects re-covered during the excavation will be

given a provenance (Harris 1989: 11). Fig.2.1 Iron Age sites in Israel-Palestine. Map by TT.

The Wheeler-Kenyon method pays the foremost attention to the layers of soil. This is done both when digging through them, and looking at the sections formed by the balks left standing during the excavation. The layers are identified by observing the color, consistency, and tex-ture of the soil (Kenyon 1961: 76). The same principle of stratification is applied to featex-tures like pits, banks, or trenches that do not form layers, but represent other kinds of man-made disturbances of the soil (Kenyon 1961: 69). This tradition has been followed especially in ex-cavations of the earliest periods like the Neolithic site of Sha’ar Hagolan (Garfinkel 2004: 27), at Tel Dan for the Neolithic (Gopher & Greenberg 1996: 67–68) and Early Bronze Age phases (Greenberg 1996: 86–96), and at Khirbet Hamra Ifdan in Jordan (Adams 2000: 379–383). The early periods tend to have little and scattered architecture, making the architectural tradition unsuitable. The Gezer excavations followed the stratigraphic method of Wheeler-Kenyon (Hol-laday 1978: 59–72; Lance 1978: 74–88; Dever 1978: 140–141), and the manual by Dever and Lance promoted the method. In the excavations of Tel Dor this tradition has been followed through all the periods excavated (Sharon 1995: 13–14). The principle of following earth lay-ering and using the sections to control between the earth layers has been widely adopted in Jordan and Israel since Kenyon’s work (Dever & Lance, eds. 1978; Dever 1980: 44; Bar-Yosef

& Mazar 1982: 313).

The most common way of digging in Israel since 1960’s can be regarded as a combination of the architectural and Wheeler-Kenyon traditions (Bar-Yosef & Mazar 1982: 315; Kletter 2015).

The method described in the excavation report of Tel Beer-Sheba I (Aharoni et al. 1973) is mostly in line with the architectural method. Astratum is defined as all the layers belonging to a certain occupational phase, like the fill beneath the floor, the floor itself, the debris on the floor, and the accumulation of soil. The material lying on the floor is considered of special importance, as the most reliable material of a stratum. Basically, a stratum in this tradition is definedarchitecturally. ALocus is “any defined area of the excavation from which the finds are recorded; i.e. usually rooms. Installations or pits inside a locus may or may not receive special loci number, depending on the considerations of the area supervisor” (Aharoni et al.

1973: 119). A new locus should be started when a floor is removed or walls appear (Aharoni et al. 1973: 119–120). At Beer-Sheva, Volkmar Fritz worked as a field supervisor during the 1970 and 1971 seasons, receiving there his initiation into archaeological field work in Israel.

Retrieval strategies and pottery presentation

The presentation of the pottery from the early, large scale excavations of the architectural tradition, like Megiddo and Beth Shean, is qualitative and typological: well preserved vessels are presented in the plates by selected drawings. In the Megiddo II report, most of the pottery types are presented by one drawing (of the first specimen found), and this “type pot” is re-peated for all strata in which the type was found (Loud 1948: no page). A similar practice seems to have been followed for the Beth Shean pottery by Fitzgerald (1930: 3–6). The pub-lished pottery naturally portrays a small fraction of the originally excavated ceramics, but the strategy of selection making was not explained.

Kenyon opted for a more intensive keeping policy and documentation of pottery (Kenyon 1971). A significant difference from the horizontal tradition is the care taken in recording the shard material. She insisted on keeping allsignificant shards, basically all the rims and deco-rated shards, in addition to the restorable vessels. In addition, a few characteristic handles and bases, or samples of distinctive wares, could be deemed worthy of keeping. She consid-ered a type series as the most informative way of publishing the pottery. She opted for a pro-cess where all diagnostic shards were registered and tied to a type series. If a new type ap-peared during the registration, a new type was added. She considered it good to publish a drawing (and short description) of all shards that were “suitable” for drawing, while the rest could be just recorded according to the type series. After recording, they could be discarded.

She considered drawing many items important because visual impression is helpful for the identification of shards to be sorted. First, after sorting the material she considered it possible to assess if the features used for identifying types were significant or not. Significance was related to chronological differences between the identified types. She considered rim shapes to be the most likely part of vessels to bear such chronological information (Kenyon 1961:

152–153; 1971: 273–277). Such detailed work required large resources, and the final reports of the pottery from the Jericho excavations in 1952–1958 only appeared in 1982 and 1983, after Kenyon’s death in 1978 (Kenyon & Holland 1982; 1983).

The retrieval of pottery in the Shechem excavations in the 1960’s (Cole 1984: 3; Davis: 2004:

106–108) is in line with the principles that Aharoni used at Tel Beer Sheba in 1969–1971. All the pottery was washed and sorted, and after this the restorable pottery was kept and re-stored. From the fragments, a selection was kept while most of the shards were discarded (Aharoni et al. 1973: 120). Ilan describes the selective retrieval at Tel Dan, with the differential strategies for 1) loci with possible restoration that were curated nearly completely, and 2) for the surface loci that were usually culled for indicative fragments and thus resulted in a smaller proportion of curated material. In this case, it turned out that there was also restorable ma-terial in the surface mama-terial, mixed with mama-terial from stratum IVB (Ilan 1999: 68). The de-scription of the field work and the retrieval of finds at Tel Kinrot is included in chapter 4.

Interpretation of Early Iron Age settlements

Over the history of research in the region, the nature of the Early Iron Age was for a long time interpreted according to the biblical narratives, as a time of semi-nomadic people and villag-ers. Settlement was interpreted as focusing on villages. This was seen in stark contrast with the settlement pattern of the “Canaanite” Late Bronze Age, with settlement concentrating in large city states (1500–1200 BCE). These flourishing urban centres collapsed, marking the end of the Late Bronze and the beginning of the Iron Age. The beginning of the Iron Age was seen as marked by newly founded, small villages, and the urban centres had shrunk as well to vil-lages (Mazar 1992: 334–336; Stager 1985, 3–4). This abrupt change in the settlement pattern was interpreted as a result of the Israelites conquering the land of Canaan, destroying the cities and building up their tribal villages (e.g. Albright 1960: 112–113; Yadin 1972: 129–132;

Stager 1985: 9 and A. Mazar 1992). Such an interpretative paradigm can be traced to biblical

scholarship and to the work of Albrecht Alt (1883–1956), who based his theory of the Israelites as a semi-nomadic people on textual research (Alt 1929). This interpretation was adopted by several scholars working in Israel, like Yohanan Aharoni and his students, including Aharon Kempinski and Volkmar Fritz (Knauf 1998; see also Herzog 2003). Since then, the urban nature of the Late Bronze Age II period has been challenged (Herzog 2003: 85–92). There was a con-siderable time in the research from the 1980’s on when the published settlements of the Early Iron Age were rural (e.g. Mazar 1981). Since the turn of the millennium, publications from Tel Kinrot (e.g. Fritz 2000; Fritz & Münger 2002), Tel Rehov (e.g. Mazar 1999; Mazar et al. 2005), and Tel Yin’am (Liebowitz 2003: 17) have started to add urban sites on the map.

The picture of early Iron Age life in Israel-Palestine as semi-nomadic village-life was the frame-work for interpreting the urban settlement of Tel Kinrot during the Early Iron Age as excep-tional (Fritz 2000: 507–509; Münger et al. 2006: 63). Fritz stressed the excepexcep-tional nature of Tel Kinrot’s urbanization “long after the final destruction of most of the former Canaanite cit-ies […] and more than a century before the re-urbanization of Iron Age II which started in the 10^th century BCE with the establishment of the united monarchy under David and Solomon (Fritz 2000: 508–509).” Now it seems that the re-urbanization, after a decline in settlement size at the end of the Late Bronze Age, began already during the Early Iron Age at several sites in region, or was absent from some sites. Tel Kinrot is not so much of an exception, but a natural part of the settlement pattern consisting of cities interacting with villages around them and fluctuating in their size. It is one of the early vital urban sites in the beginning of the Iron Age. Other major urban sites in the northern inland region of Israel-Palestine include Megiddo and Beth Shean, which were small compared with Tel Kinrot during the Early Iron Age. The Early Iron Age from Tel Dan has been too poorly published to evaluate the size and urban character of the site. However, it seems that Dan was sizable and probably an urban settle-ment (Ilan 1999). It seems that Tel Rehov (e.g. Mazar 1999) and probably Abel Beth Maacah (Wachtel et al. 2013; Panitz-Cohen et al. 2013) are also urban settlements from the Early Iron Age. On the coast, urban sites dating to the Early Iron Age include Dor, Tell Qasile, and Tell Keisan.

The origins of the Early Iron Age population was a theme for vigorous discussion in the 1990’s (e.g. Ben-Tor & Ben-Ami 1998; Finkelstein 1998, 1996; Mazar 1997a). The connection between ethnicity and archaeological evidence is a complex and disputed issue (Meyers 1993: 738─745;

Kletter 2006). It has been suggested that the inhabitants of Early Iron Age Tel Kinrot may be related to or rooted in the region north of Tel Kinrot, now part of southern Lebanon and Syria.

The suggestion is based on based on pottery (“Syrian amphora”, see 5.2), and glyptic repre-sentations of the Syro-Egyptian Deity Reshef (Münger 2005: 86–87; 2008: 96; 2009: 130, foot-note 79; 2011: 234–235; Münger et al. 2006: 64). These questions about ethnicity, as well as the absolute chronology of the Iron Age in Israel-Palestine, fall outside the focus of my study.

2.3 Pottery Typology – Principles and Practice