The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, vol. 2: The Eighth Century B.C.E.

• Author: Herzog, Ze'ev
• Position: Book Review

The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, vol. 2: The Eighth Century B.C.E. By RON E. TAPPY. Harvard Semitic Studies, vol. 50. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2001. Pp. xxviii + 668, illus. $89.95.

The salvage of unpublished excavation material by processing their data and presenting the results to the scientific community is a blessed step forward in the archaeological discipline, rescuing data otherwise lost forever. Such were the efforts undertaken by S. V. Chambon in reanalysis of de Vaux's excavations at Tell el-Far'ah (north, Chambon 1984) and by G. D. Pratico in publishing Nelson Glueck's excavations at Tell el-Kheleifeh (Pratico 1993). Another approach to reanalysis has involved renewed excavations. Ben-Tor's excavations at Hazor (Ben-Tor and Bonfil 1997), J. Balensi's with M. D. Herrera's project at Tell Abu-Hawam (Balensi, Herrera, and Artzy 1993), and Ussishkin's explorations at Lachish (Ussishkin forthcoming) are such cases. Tappy's extensive study of Samaria belongs to neither of the above. The Joint Expedition to Samaria in 1932-35 fulfilled its scientific obligations and published a full account of the work in several substantial volumes (Crowfoot and Crowfoot 1938; Crowfoot, Kenyon, and Crowfoot 1957; Crowfoot, Kenyon, and Sukenik 1942) and the current study did not evolve any fieldwork at the site. Actually, the Joint Expedition's initiative was already a restudy of the site of Samaria, first excavated in 1908-10 by a Harvard University expedition and itself fully published (Reisner, Fisher, and Lyon 1924). Tappy's research is a unique and challenging instance of a secondary revision of excavations at a fully published archaeological site.

The approximately seven hundred pages of the current volume discuss the archaeological material uncovered by the Joint Expedition to Samaria related to the eighth century B.C., following the earlier volume on the tenth-ninth centuries (Tappy 1992). The author's objective was to "offer not only a typologically based but also a stratigraphically based reassessment of the history of this important site" in order to achieve "a complete reconstruction of the depositional history of Samaria." This undertaking, which goes beyond the data published by the excavators, is made possible "[t]hanks to the preservation of numerous unpublished field sections" that were provided to him by the Palestine Exploration Fund in London (p. xxix). The author makes the utmost use of this material. The detailed...