Archaeological Views: Children of Three Paradigms

When my kids listen to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, I proudly tell them that when the legendary sound track of the 1960s and the 1970s was created, “I was there.” Studying archaeology in the early 1970s, at a time when major intellectual transformations reshaped the discipline, my generation of archaeologists also “was there.” Indeed, this generation of Israeli archaeologists are children of three successive archaeological paradigms: (1) traditional (or culture history), (2) modern (scientific, processual) and (3) postmodern (interpretive, reflexive).

How did we experience these disciplinary “revolutions” in Israel, and what is their impact on the research agenda at the current excavations at Tel Beth-Shemesh, directed by Zvi Lederman, an old classmate from Tel Aviv University, and me?

As beginners in archaeology we were exposed both to normative culture historical archaeology and to the unique brand of Israeli Biblical archaeology: secular, yet existentially and emotionally tied to the Bible. The strong ties with the Bible dictated research agendas and explanatory paradigms hardly different from that of earlier scholarship during the “Golden Age” of the archaeology of Palestine between the two World Wars. The main interest still focused on conspicuous historical events, such as royal building enterprises, military campaigns, wholesale destructions, etc. Ordinary life and social and cultural processes were mostly ignored.