Gezer Field III 1998 Overview

John S. Holladay, Jr., University of Toronto, Excavations in Field III at Gezer: The Solomonic Gateway

This is a three-year proposal for full publication—to current standards—of the 1967-1969 Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Gezer Project's Excavations in Field III: The Solomonic Gateway (Israel Grid Reference 142 x 140). Apart from the very considerable interest of the architectural succession, the great archaeological appeal of the excavations is the tight control exercised in excavation, the detailed stratigraphic sequence that resulted in a long series of independent "close chronological horizons," and the systematic collection of almost all diagnostic pottery-of unprecedented value for, among other things, filling in the sparsely documented ceramic chronology of Israel, Judah, and the Hellenistic period. A small part of this stratigraphy was usefully exploited in Holladay 1990 ("Red Slip, Burnish, and the Solomonic Gateway at Gezer," BASOR 277/78, pp. 23¬70).

This publication is specifically designed to illustrate the "balk-controlled debris-layer analytic" (true "Wheeler-Kenyon") mode of archaeology in the Middle East and in so doing will differ materially from other volumes in the Gezer series. The challenge, faced in the present proposal, is the massiveness of the task. Balk-controlled debris-layer analytic archaeology utilizing databased materials and employing statistical analysis of large datasets is necessarily time and labor-intensive. But it renders possible an entirely higher plane of interpretive certainty.

Documentation of the excavations in the gate area (450 m2) resulted in an unprecedented number of independent loci, stratigraphic observations, and over 5,000 pottery drawings. Since the stratigraphy of most phases of occupation was split in half by the great central drain and individual stratigraphic successions were isolated from each other by architectural elements, great care needs to be taken in coordinating the individual loci into subphases and phases. While this is a problem in all large excavation areas, it is greatly multiplied in Field III. Currently, there are no recognized techniques--certainly none with a statistical basis for verification-for accomplishing this.

Our solution calls for a completely database-driven approach (so that all the data may be brought to bear on each aspect of the reconstruction) and new techniques for analyzing and definitively correlating the intra-site stratigraphy. This is the most innovative aspect of the research design, deriving from our work on the materials from Tell el-Maskhuta. It is a statistically based methodology for intra-site and inter-site comparison (the latter enabling highly secure cross-dating) utilizing a wide range of the diagnostic elements of the Gezer sherdage in computer-aided comparisons with the entire range of gate loci and, for cross-dating, published materials from key Iron I and II sites. This large ¬sample, multivariate approach is opposed to the conventional practice of citing a few key forms for any one stratigraphic correlation/cross-dating and addresses the critical need for more quantitative analyses of relative ceramic sequences (Mazar 1997).