to achieve its own major objective, i.e., the demonstration of the “historicity” of the Bible (at least as it was seen at the time).

There were also significant, indeed critical, factors that may be regarded as external to biblical archaeology per se, although very much a part of archaeology in general in modern Israel, Jordan, and elsewhere. These included the stratigraphic revolution of the 1950s–1960s led by English archaeologist kathleen kenyon and others, which promised “total retrieval,” automatically generating more and more varied data that required analysis by interdisciplinary specialists; the growing complexity and costs of excavation, especially in Israel, which pushed the field inevitably toward professionalization and secular sources of support; field schools and student voluntarism, which not only constituted an intellectual challenge but broke the monopoly of biblical scholars on dig staffs and thus contributed to the secularization of the discipline; the increasing sense that biblical archaeology was indeed parochial and had failed to achieve even its own limited agenda of historical-theological issues; increasing competition among the national schools—especially those now in the Middle East—which highlighted fundamental and legitimate differences in approach and thus called into question any exclusively biblical view of ancient Syria-Palestine; and finally, the advent of “the new archaeology,” as it was called, which began in American New World archaeology in the early 1960s and by the end of that decade was beginning to have an impact on archaeological theory and method generally.

The principal aspects of the new archaeology were more anthropological than historical in their orientation, i.e., away from particularization and more toward the study of culture and culture change generally. It was an approach that sought to formulate and test lawlike propositions that governed the cultural process (thus the common designation “processualist archaeology”) in order to develop a body of theory that would qualify archaeology as not only a discipline but a true science. In addition, it had an ecological thrust, which emphasized techno-environmental factors (rather than simply evolutionary trajectories) in the role of adaptation in culture change. It was a multidisciplinary strategy that involved many of the physical sciences and their statistical and analytical procedures in attempting to reconstruct the ancient landscape, climate, population, economy, sociopolitical structure, and other subsystems (often using the model of general systems theory), and there was an insistence on an overall, up-front “research design” for projects that would integrate all of the above and thus would advance archaeology as a culturally relevant enterprise.

This discussion of biblical and new archaeology in the 1950s and the 1960s, so much of it highly theoretical, does not imply that nothing else was going on during this period, for example, in the area of fieldwork. For one thing, the face of the Middle East was changing rapidly. In particular, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the succeeding war between Israel and the Arab states, and the 1967 war—all redrawing international boundaries—had the most profound consequences for the archaeology of ancient Syria-Palestine.

The denouement of the colonial era had an especially significant impact, of course, on the foreign schools that had come to dominate the discipline. Most of the foreign fieldwork in Palestine until 1967 was carried out on the West Bank, the “heartland” of ancient Israel. The American excavations, mostly biblical archaeology, were generally sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research, and the results were often published in its periodical, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, as part of an annual series, and sometimes in the semipopular journal Biblical Archaeologist.

British work, which was sponsored chiefly by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, was directed for many years by Professor Kathleen Kenyon and involved in particular her excavations at Jericho (1955–1958) but also those at Qumran (1949–1957), Petra in Transjordan (1958–1968), and Umm el-Biyara and Tawilan (1958–1970). In the late 1960s, the British school in Jerusalem began the publication of its serial Levant in addition to the much older journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly.