The Manasseh Hill Country Survey, volume 1: The Shechem Syncline.

• Author: Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth
• Position: Book review

The Manasseh Hill Country Survey, volume 1: The Shechem Syncline. By ADAM ZERTAL. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 21.1. Leiden: BRILL, 2004. Pp. xi + 603, illus. $209.

This first of five projected volumes (in English) of the Manasseh Hill Country Survey sets a new standard by providing ecological and environmental data for each site. Volume 1, The Shechem Syncline, an expanded version of the Hebrew published in 1992, covers from the Dothan Valley in the north to Shechem in the southeast and the Samaria/Sebaste region in the southwest.

In the preface and first two chapters Adam Zertal presents his methodological and historical approach--to gather and publish the data, analyze them, and then draw historical conclusions based on "the Bible as well as other historical sources" (a contentious premise)--and procedures. The territory was divided into eleven "landscape units" (20-70 [km.sup.2] each), which were completely surveyed on foot. Each site description includes the serial number; site number incorporating longitude and latitude coordinates, site name (in Hebrew, English, and Arabic), reference points according to Israel and UTM grids, absolute and relative elevations, type of name, site type (e.g., tell, Arab village, enclosure, cairn), area (maximal size), topography, rock type, soil quality, cultivation (contemporary), cisterns, nearest water source, nearest road (ancient or modern), visibility (based on number of sites of the same period visible), verbal description, pottery (by periods and percentages; at select sites augmented by systematic collection in 10 x 10 m squares), special finds, identification with historical places, references in historical sources, earlier surveys, and bibliography. Photographs of the site and distinctive finds, pottery drawings, and selective site plans supplement the descriptions.

Chapter three begins with an overview of the natural factors (geography, geology, climate and soil, water and vegetation, and passages and roads) and Zertal's defining pottery types for each period (plates would have been helpful). Zertal acknowledges but does not treat problematic periods, regional differences, and discrepancies between excavation and survey pottery assemblages. In summary fashion, he then presents patterns of settlement from the Chalcolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.E.; all subsequent dates are B.C.E. unless otherwise noted) through the Ottoman period (1516-1917 C.E.), with synchronic as well...