Archaeological Survey of the Hill Country of Benjamin.

• Author: Jacobs, Paul F.

In the decade of the 1980s the Israel Antiquities Authority initiated a survey of the central hill country of Israel. Archaeological Survey of the Hill Country of Benjamin presents results from that survey, reporting on some five hundred square kilometers between Ramallah and Jerusalem, data essential to any comprehensive overview of settlement patterns, trade and political alliances, routes of communication, and the like for any period in the past. This book takes an essential and large step toward the (archaeological) reconstruction of past cultures and sub-cultures of the surveyed region.

For readers without access to modern Hebrew, much that the book offers will be beyond reach: the English section of the book is a much abbreviated version of the Hebrew, as a comparison of the numbers of pages allotted to each shows. Indeed, the format of the Hebrew portion of the book makes the data easier to locate and, hence, to compare from one site summary to another. The Hebrew also contains some information not included in the English. For example, the English summary of each site lists site number, map location, site name, size in dunams, summary description, sherds by era and by percentage, and total number of sherds. The Hebrew gives, in addition, elevation above sea level, distance from the site to a source of water, and a description from a single line to a small paragraph in length. Each (Hebrew) chapter lists sites corresponding to a surveyed map section (e.g., section 16-14) located on the accompanying 1:50,000 map (the English, not divided into chapters, consists of a serial list of sites). In addition, at the beginning of each Hebrew chapter are summaries.

This book is an essential purchase for any serious archaeological library (including those dedicated to English-reading patrons). It is unfortunate that the entire book has not already been translated; however, the struggle to read the Hebrew text, even with dictionary in hand, is worth the effort.

The usefulness and excellence of the book are obvious; only two general matters detract from it. First, the reader is informed that because of widely divergent field conditions, a variety of (sampling?) methods and recording techniques formed the base level of data; however, nowhere do the editors discuss theoretical (or practical) matters of interpreting and incorporating data drawn from...