Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West; Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon.

• Author: Knapp, A. Bernard

This very timely volume contains most of the papers originally presented in a colloquium at the 1992 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. The one-page preface by Gitin is no substitute for an editorial overview, which would have helped greatly to set these papers in the desired context of increased communication and exchange between scholars involved in the archaeology of the Levant and the Aegean. Nor does the concluding, very basic overview of trade by W. Dever really come to grips with any current theoretical thinking on trade, which it purports to do. Moreover, Dever's idiosyncratic and often opinionated views about Levantine archaeology are becoming wearisome: it is inappropriate in the extreme to call Martin Bernal a "charlatan" (p. 118, n. 26), however little one may regard the most recent, error-prone volume of Black Athena (vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991]).

What this volume lacks in theoretical perspective, however, it makes up for marvelously in its presentation of important and recently excavated material. From my own perspective, none is more significant than the paper by W. Niemeier on the "Aegean" (his term) fresco paintings from the late Middle Bronze Age "palace" at Tel Kabri in Israel. Here we see (black-and-white) plates of this structure's painted plaster floors with their floral, avian, maritime, and architectural subjects. Likewise, M. Artzy's paper on Tel Nami, a key coastal site and trading center of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, is very welcome and presents to a wide audience some of the rich material excavated at this site over the past decade: among the artifacts, none is more striking than the bronze items (bowls, lamps, sceptres, incense burners), some of which have stylistic counterparts in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus.

Excavations at Tel Miqne (ancient Ekron) continue to reveal impressive amounts of Late Helladic (Mycenaean) IIIC:1b material from early Iron Age levels, as well as the Philistine pottery that followed it. Trude Dothan tells us this and we are further told that the final phase of the local Late Bronze culture produced "abundant examples of imported Cypriote and Mycenaean fragments as well as New kingdom objects" (p. 42), but unfortunately no illustrations are offered. In referring to the Aegeanizing, palatial associations of a hearth found in a monumental structure of the twelfth century B.C...