Integration of Archaeology and Texts

This volume follows the changes that occurred in central Palestine during the longue duree between the 7th to the 11th centuries. That region offers a unique micro-history of the Islamicate world, providing the opportunity for intensive archaeological research and rich primary sources.

Through a careful comparison between the archaeological records and the textual evidence, a new history of Palestine and the Islamicate world emerges – one that is different than that woven from Arabic geographies and chronicles alone. The book highlights the importance of using a variety of sources when possible and examining each type of source in its own context. The volume spans ancient technologies and daily life, ancient agriculture, and the perception of place by ancient authors. It also explores the shift of settlements and harbors in central Palestine, as well as the gradual development of a new metropolis, al-Ramla.

Settlement and Urbanization in Early Islamic Palestine will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history of Islam or the history of Palestine, or anyone working more generally in the methodology of historical research and integrating texts and archaeology.

Consideration is given to how elements of the occult: witchcraft, magic and sorcery may be identified in the archaeological record. Working definitions of occult terminology are established before proceeding to propose a new approach, which triangulates data from historic and folkloric sources with archaeological evidence, to establish contextual narratives that stand for the past. Excavation of an occult ritual site at Barway, Cambridgeshire is presented to demonstrate how the approach works in practice. Archaeological evidence, combined with local folklore and historic accounts of spells and sorcery, identify the site as the locus of occult activity performed by cunning folk, or ‘white’ witches, during the seventeenth-century.

KEYWORDS
OCCULT, CUNNING FOLK, WITCH, WITCHCRAFT, SPELL, MAGIC, SORCERY, FOLKLORE, EAST ANGLIA, ELY, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY, GRIMOIRE, PENDLE WITCH TRIAL, MATTHEW HOPKINS, JOHN STEARNE.

In this section I will survey some of the solutions to the disappearance of the archaeological synagogues from the period of the Mishnah and Talmud era. There are various suggestions by Archaeologists including the "Spolia" theory. On the other side, some historians examined again the literary sources refering to synagogue in the rabbinic corpus. But as this debate was going to one direction, some new discoveries changed the trend yet again but on these recent developments in the third and ultimate part soon...

The first part of the story of the question of the dating of the Galilean Synagogues and the connection between the Archaeological dating of the famous synagogues and the evidence from the Misnah and Talmud. The similarity between the famous Biblical Archaeoligy debate and the question of "Where are the Synagogues of the Sages" are susrpising and the momentum is shifting once again.

Intensive concern for the proper observance of the Levitical purity laws was characteristic of various Jewish groups living in Judea during the late Second Temple period. The purity laws, concentrated in the Priestly Code (mostly in Lev 11–15 and Num 19), describe numerous sources of ritual impurity (e.g. dead swarming creatures, male and female genital discharges, human corpses etc.), venues whereby impurity is transferred from one object or person to another, and methods for purifying people, clothing and vessels that have become impure. Rigorous interest in the Levitical purity laws is evidenced in the literature of the period, including the Biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and the works of Josephus Flavius. Continued interest in ritual purity law, at least within the rabbinic academy, is evidenced by the copious early rabbinic literature devoted to the topic; these laws are the focus of an entire order of the Mishnah and Tosefta (Ṭeharot; lit., “Purities”), and are the topic of many rabbinic pericopes interspersed throughout the Talmudic literature of the Roman and Early Byzantine periods.

Of late, the literary sources have been supplemented by a plethora of archaeological finds which provide evidence for the centrality of ritual purity observance in the daily lives of Jews in Judea during the Roman period. Chief amongst these finds are stepped water installations which served as ritual baths (miqwāʾôt) for the purificatory immersion of ritually impure people, clothing and vessels. Another important archaeological phenomenon which indicates observance of ritual purity laws is the widespread use of chalkstone vessels, as stone was regarded to be a material impervious to ritual impurity. Additionally, a marked absence of imported pottery at most Jewish sites throughout the Early Roman period has been explained by numerous scholars as a reflection of concern over the ritual impurity of ceramic vessels produced outside the borders of the Land of Israel.

Identifying gender ambiguity in historical settings—that is, gender markers among past human societies—can be an elusive endeavor for the modern scholar. Only rarely is it possible to trace aspects of gender ambiguity in ancient texts as well as in archaeological artifacts. This, however, is exactly my aim in this paper. Building upon my past research on hegemonic—and especially, non-hegemonic—masculine identities in the ancient Near East, the case study discussed here involves the male cult attendants of Inanna/Ištar, the Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality and war.

This article examines new approaches to investigating the fabric of the Babylonian cities, based on both archaeological and written sources. It focuses on the physical composition of the non-monumental sectors of the city, emphasising the agency of the local inhabitants in shaping their immediate environment and examining the processes by which houses and neighbourhoods were transformed over time.

Archaeology is indispensable for understanding the genesis and development of halakhah, Jewish ritual law, and the impact of its observance on the functioning of ancient Jewish societies. Using examples from my own work over the past few years, this paper seeks to illustrate the kinds of data archaeology can provide on how ancient halakhah was practiced, information which is simply not to be found in texts. The topics to be surveyed include mikva’ot (ritual baths), chalkstone vessels and tefillin (phylacteries). The unique contribution of archaeology to the study of each of these halakhic phenomena is explored with special focus on what archaeology has to teach us about these rituals which we would not have known from the texts alone. Some of the potential hazards and pitfalls of using archaeology together with texts of a halakhic nature are discussed as well, including the anachronistic use of written sources in interpreting earlier remains and the mistaken privileging of rabbinic halakhah over alternative possibilities. Archaeology and texts tend to provide very different kinds of information, and if brought together prudently, hold the potential to afford a much more comprehensive and accurate understanding of how halakhah was observed in the ancient past.

The second volume to Archaeology and Text, an on-line open access journal, is now available at https://www.ariel.ac.il/wp/archaeology-and-text/volume-2/.

We are encouraging submissions for the next volume, and we are especially interested in papers which deal with the issue of the interface between texts and archaeology -- what are the problems, what are the potentials?

David Small
Yonatan Adler
Co-editors

One problem with written materials in the Aegean Bronze Age is that they are asked to fulfil a dual interpretative function: on the one hand, we use the content of documents we can read (mostly Linear B, less so Linear A and barely at all Cretan Hieroglyphic) to construct text-based narratives, while, on the other, we use the archaeological contexts in which documents are found to situate interpretations in particular spaces (e.g., ‘Archives’) or sites (e.g., ‘administrative centres’). In this talk I attempt to read behind the Linear B documents to assess how representative is the textual record as it has survived today.  This requires an examination of both archaeological and textual ‘taphonomies’ – how and why certain documents survive archaeologically and why certain texts were (and were not) produced within the systems we can observe today. Situating the Linear B texts within a world of literate and non-literate practice helps shape some speculative thoughts about the use of writing in the 2nd millennium BC from its beginning to close to its end.