Author's Preface

Author’s Preface In the summer of 1960, I had the opportunity to make what I thought might be a once-in- a-lifetime journey to the “Holy Land” to participate in an archaeological excavation. I had no idea that that summer’s experience would lead to a decades-long archaeological involvement in the biblical heartland during which I was to have the privilege of responsibility for digging on multi-season excavations at three different ancient city-mounds: Shechem, Gezer, and Tell Halif. This was an exciting period for American archaeology in that region, and each of these three projects introduced new, improved strategies for carefully separating successive soil and construction layers as well as new standards for the retrieval, recording, and analysis of the historical remains (described more fully in chap. 1.D: Excavation Method and Process). I owe debts of gratitude to the directors of each of those three projects for inviting me to have a small part in the evolving discipline of modern archaeology in the Near Eastern world. My first mentor in the field was G. Ernest Wright, then at Harvard University, who in 1956 had opened new excavations at Shechem (Tell Balatah) in the central hills of biblical Israel. There had been a two-decade hiatus of American archaeological work in the region, extending through World War II and the post-war violent tug-of-war between Jews and Muslim Arabs for control of the land. Meanwhile, new methods of excavation had been evolving, developed to detect and separate the successive soil and occupation layers at ancient sites in other parts of the world. Professor Wright, therefore, had three objectives in mind for opening new excavations at Shechem. First, by applying newer digging controls, particularly the so-called “Wheeler-Ken- yon” grid-and-balk technique, he wanted to determine what new or improved information could be gained at a major tell that had been extensively dug much earlier in the century. Second, he wanted to enhance controls on the excavation process by having potsherds retrieved from each locus washed and examined during the same day for the information they might provide for the dating or the character of occupation materials while they were still being uncovered. Third, he wanted to structure the excavation as a field-training operation that would gather and train a new generation of American scholars who might be inspired to pursue further archaeological research in the region. He achieved these objectives well. The succession of Shechem digging seasons clarified and expanded the known history of this once capital of northern Israel. And, as a number of us whose first experience of archaeology was at Shechem went on to devote time and energies to other archaeological projects, the Shechem dig set a new standard for archaeological work at other sites in the region. I remain deeply grateful to Ernest Wright for enabling me to discover an excitement for a career enterprise I had not seriously considered and for creating a teaching environment at Shechem that prepared me to pursue that excitement with a proper foundation. I likewise owe gratitude to other members of the Shechem senior staff, such as Edward Campbell, Robert Bull, James Ross, Joseph Callaway, and G. R. H. “Mick” Wright. They pro- vided me models of professional dedication and were all more than helpful as I learned the basics of controlled digging. I am especially indebted to Lawrence E. Toombs, the Associate xiv Author’s Preface Director of the expedition, who was also my mentor at Drew University’s Graduate School of Religion. It was he who first urged me to consider going to Shechem. And when our early 1960s seasons uncovered four carefully separated occupational layers of the Middle Bronze II period (17th century B.C.E.), it was Larry Toombs who suggested to Professor Wright that I be allowed to analyze and publish the pottery from those layers. That study became my Ph.D. dissertation and eventually the first final report volume of the Drew-McCormick-Harvard Shechem Expedi- tion (Cole 1984). Shechem in the mid-1960s was still in Jordanian-controlled Palestine, and Ernest Wright also wanted to introduce what one might call the “Wheeler-Kenyon+Wright” method of excavation within the recently formed state of Israel. In cooperation with noted archaeologist and Hebrew Union College President Nelson Glueck, the site chosen was Tell Gezer, a large city- mound in the foothills between biblical Judah and Philistine territory. Like Shechem, it was a major mound that had been extensively investigated at the beginning of the 20th century. Under Wright’s aegis, and with sponsorship by Hebrew Union College and Harvard University, pre- liminary work began in 1965 and a major project, directed by William G. Dever, opened in 1966. Dever, a protégé of Wright, had been among the group of graduate students on the junior staff at Shechem, and in preparation for the 1966 season at Gezer, he invited several of us erst- while Shechemites to join the Gezer core staff. I had not calculated on spending more summers away from my wife and four daughters and from other research and writing projects that might have been more relevant to my college teaching career, but I have been exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to be involved in the Gezer project, because it represented an important further major development in American-led archaeology in the region. At Gezer, Bill Dever and his Associate Director, H. Darrell Lance, introduced several significant refinements to the Shechem process of tell archaeology that were to become widely copied by later American, Israeli, and other projects in the region. Of first importance, the tradi- tional use of local workmen to do the digging tasks was replaced by a field school of volunteers ranging in age from college students to retirees, males and females, who were trained on-site in small units of four or five and assigned to a 5 × 5-m area working under an experienced area supervisor, with their field experience supplemented by evening lectures and a multi-page manual (Lance 1966; see also Dever and Lance 1978). We discovered that working with briefly trained but highly motivated volunteers allowed us to uncover more in a season’s digging than we had at Shechem with local hired laborers and to do it more carefully, extracting more dependable information and better preserving the evidence. In addition, those of us supervising did not have to spend as much time closely overseeing our team workers. After the initial training days, we were allowed more time to work directly in the soil ourselves and so to become more adept at detecting nuanced changes separating different layers. It also enabled us to devote more time to recording the unfolding evidence on an hour-by-hour basis. The upgraded recording standard was a very important refinement, entailing an explosion in the amount and scope of day-by-day measurements and detailed description of finds being recorded as work was proceeding in the field. In place of the pocket-sized notebooks we used as area supervisors at Shechem, each area supervisor at Gezer carried into the field a full-sized ring binder. In these were recorded the precise three-dimensional limits of each unit of soil uncovered in each of the operations on which different team members were working, along with detailed descriptions of the character of the soil and of whatever features were being exposed. Author’s Preface xv Each basket of pottery and each artifact was numbered and tagged, along with its locus number, before it left the area. Each day, a new full-page site plan would be drawn, providing exact loca- tions of all features and of each locus currently exposed. In addition, supervisors would regu- larly update section drawings of each of the four vertical sidewalls (balks) of each area, measur- ing the precise vertical upper and lower limits of each uncovered soil layer or other feature. At the end of each season, the field supervisor, typically overseeing four or more areas, would have at his or her disposal a full volume of detailed information for each area to aid in reconstructing an accurate portrait of what had been exposed. Another refinement at Gezer was an expansion in the numbers and types of specialists participating on site. A prime example was the addition of a first-rate geologist to the staff, Reuben Bullard of the University of Cincinnati. At Shechem, we had learned to observe carefully the visual character of soil layers, such as their color and texture. At Gezer, Reuben helped us to distinguish the composition of different soil layers in order to determine their formation processes—that is, where they had come from and how they had been deposited, whether by wind, rain, or erosion; or by human activity such as construction, occupation, or destruction. Developing this awareness refined our ability to observe more quickly and clearly the nature of the materials we were uncovering and to reconstruct their historical context. Through my sub- sequent field seasons, I would have numerous occasions to be thankful for the insights I gained from Reuben Bullard. For all these reasons, I am very thankful to Bill Dever for bringing me in on the ground floor of the Gezer Project. I am most appreciative for all that I learned during the seasons between 1966–1971 as supervisor of excavations in Field II and Field VI NW and as contributor to two final report volumes (Dever et al. 1974; 1988) while working under his directorship. In 1972, Joe D. Seger, who also had been on the Gezer core staff from the beginning, took over as director of Phase II of the Gezer excavations (1972–1974), and he invited me to con- tinue on the core staff as archaeological consultant.

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