(1928–1934). These, too, were biblical sites, but the secular stream of U.S. Palestinian archaeology never captured the imagination of the public or succeeded in perpetuating itself as the Albright school did. In retrospect, it seems that, in the United States at least, archaeology in “poor Palestine” was not thought to be able to justify itself without the biblical connection.

British work in Palestine between the two wars combined biblical and nonbiblical interests. The principal excavations were those at Ashkelon (1920–1922); Dor (1923, 1924); Petrie’s at Tell Jemmeh (1926, 1927), Tell el Fara (1927–1929), and Tell el Ajjul (1930–1934); the Mt. Carmel prehistoric caves (1925–1934); Petra (1929–1936); Athlit (1930–1933); Samaria (1930–1935); Jericho (1930–1936); Lachish (1932–1940); Kh. Mefjer (1935–1948); and, of course, many projects in Jerusalem.

The French approach between the wars was similar, the major excavations in Palestine being those at Ai (1933–1935), Teleilat al-Ghassul (1929–1938), and several prehistoric sites. The same combination of secular and religious interests characterized the German school, with excavations at Mambre (1926–1928) and Kh. el-Minyeh (1932–1939). However, neither the British, French, German, or any other international school combined Palestinian and biblical archaeology in the deliberate, almost exclusively biblical, and often theological way that much of the American work did.

British advantages during the Mandate period notwithstanding, biblical archaeology in Albright’s unique style seemed triumphant on the eve of World War II when all fieldwork came to a halt. Nevertheless, despite differences in approach among the various schools, archaeology in Palestine had made enormous strides in this third era, which may be characterized as “the classification period,” when the stratigraphy of the major sites was first worked out and the chronological-cultural history was outlined for the first time from the Paleolithic to the Islamic periods.

The Heyday and the Decline of Biblical Archaeology: 1950–1970

American-style biblical archaeology reached its zenith soon after the resumption of post–World War II fieldwork in Palestine in the early 1950s. Principal excavations were those of Wright at Shechem (1957–1968), J.B. Pritchard at Gibeon (1956–1962), J.A. Callaway at Ai (1964–1969), P.W. Lapp at Teller Rumeith, Tell el Fûl, and TaCanach (1964–1968), and Pritchard at Tell esSaCaidiyeh (1964–1967). All of those excavations, which were affiliated with the American school in Jerusalem, were at biblical sites; the directors in every case were clergymen and professors of theology or religion; the agenda was often drawn from issues in biblical studies; and funds came largely from religious circles. In addition, the generation of younger American archaeologists who would come to the fore in the 1970s was trained at these sites.

In addition, a series of publications by Albright, Wright, and others attracted international attention to American biblical archaeology and provoked heated controversy in Europe. At issue were both fundamental questions of method in general (biblically biased or not) and certain specific historical questions in biblical studies (the historicity of the patriarchs and the Israelite conquest, Moses and monotheism, Israelite religion and cult, etc.). Neither Albright nor Wright was a fundamentalist (although certainly conservative by more recent standards), yet outside of the United States suspicions prevailed. The misgivings were prescient, for by the early 1970s, biblical archaeology (along with the biblical theology movement, an outgrowth of postwar neo-orthodoxy) was moribund, if not dead.

In retrospect, the demise of biblical archaeology was probably inevitable, for many reasons. First, what may be called the internal weaknesses of the movement were numerous: its reputation for amateurish fieldwork, naive or biased scholarship, and poor publication; its parochial character, related as it was largely to the conservative (if not fundamentalist) character of so much of religious life in the United States; its reactionary nature, locked into dated theological issues, which left its practitioners unable to respond creatively to new developments in or outside the field; its resistance to growing trends toward specialization and professionalism; and, above all, the fact that it failed