century was characterized by adventurism, by nationalism and competition among the colonial powers, and by growing expectations that archaeology would shed a unique light upon the biblical world. Yet ancient Syria had scarcely been touched, although some archaeological exploration there had begun as early as the 1860s under French scholars like Ernest Renan.

From the Turn of the Century until World War I: The Formative Period

The first two decades of the twentieth century constituted a sort of “golden age” in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, one that saw the first large-scale, reasonably well-staffed and well-funded field projects. These included the work of the Americans at Samaria (1908–1910); of the British at Tell Gezer (1902–1909); and of the Germans at TaCanach (1902–1904), Megiddo (1903–1905), Jericho (1907–1909), and the Galilean synagogues (1905). In Syria, Howard Crosby Butler’s splendid surveys of Byzantine Christian sites (1904–1909) for Princeton University deserve mention, but by and large, Syria was ignored as being peripheral to the Holy Land. None of these excavations, however, with the exception of george a. reisner’s work at Samaria (results of which were not published until 1924), demonstrated more than the rudiments of stratigraphy. Pottery chronology was off by centuries, and the publication volumes, although sometimes lavishly illustrated, are largely useless today. An almost exclusively architectural orientation, and/or biblical biases, marred most of the work.

All of these and other projects were brought to a halt by the onset of World War I, but the foundations of both Syro-Palestinian and biblical archaeology had been laid. Nevertheless, neither an academic discipline nor a profession had yet emerged in this second, formative period.

Between the Great Wars: The Classification Period

Following the corrupt bureaucracy of Ottoman Turkish rule, Palestine became a British mandate in 1918 at the close of World War I. The British government opened a Department of Antiquities, promulgated modern antiquities laws, and undertook the first systematic, comprehensive program of archaeological investigation of the entire area, including Transjordan. During the ensuing period, the foreign schools in Jerusalem flourished, particularly the American School of Oriental Research, which now dominated the field under the direction of william f. albright (1920–1929; 1933–1936). Albright, one of the most eminent orientalists of the twentieth century, was then followed by his protégé Nelson Glueck, who was famous for his explorations in Transjordan.

It was Albright who became known as “the father of biblical archaeology” through his unparalleled mastery of the pottery of Palestine, of the broad ancient Near Eastern context in which the results of Palestinian archaeology needed to be placed to illuminate them properly, and of the vast scope of biblical history with which individual discoveries often seemed to correlate. Although Albright himself sometimes used the term Syro-Palestinian archaeology, his overriding concern was with the biblical world. Through his genius; his towering status; his own excavations at Tell el-Fûl (1922), Bethel (1934), and especially at Tell Beit Mirsim (1926–1932); and his innumerable disciples, Albright dominated “biblical archaeology” from the early 1920s through the 1960s. One of his protégés, G. Ernest Wright of Harvard, carried on the tradition by coupling “biblical archaeology” more specifically with the “biblical theology” movement that flourished in the 1950s–1970s. A transitional figure, Wright trained most of the older American generation still working in the field today.

Many of the U.S. excavations in Palestine between the two world wars, under Albright’s influence, were at biblical sites, staffed by Protestant seminarians and clergymen, and supported by funds from church circles. These included Albright’s own excavations and those at Tell en-Nasbeh (1926–1935), Beth-shemesh (1928– 1933), and many smaller sites. Nevertheless, there was a parallel, secular U.S. tradition, especially in the large projects of the University of Pennsylvania at Beth-Shan (1926–1933); of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago at Megiddo (1925–1939), well funded by the Rockefellers; and of Yale University at Jerash in Transjordan