The BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST &F- Published by THE AMERICAN SCHOOLS OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH Jerusalem and Bagdad Room 102, 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Mass. VOL. XXIX December,1 966 No. 4 ii:i:ii:-I::i~i?i.~~.:ij :l,i; : ~:~- :::-i ::,_i:-::i- : .l .i.i.7I:.7i:.-:i:i~-?i:-i'?~:~l. :i i : :'? :::: ::- :-:S:.i4i? m:_ ?y:.-,. :?,i- : :: :_-i~i:i l~iE::::::::.i :iii i:j~~~i iii:li -iii:i- l;i'-i :-:::; : ::: ?:? .;45k ? .: ::; :: : :jii~l:iili:~l-i:i::: ii l. i:..ii: :.:i..i:i : ::i- ,a:: M i i . : . ': :: :: ::: :::- ::-:?-:: ::::::::;:I:i :::-i:::I-: li:.:~i:ii :i:~i.i -~lii iieir~.i:,.ili. :i .~i_:: i,?::I : tl i~:.,: n:::::: - ~i~ .; i~i:i?? ::???ij ~ :'i ?? ??-- :: i.:.: r I:i'i :i:: ~-- iiA wl, : :-:': : :::;: :i:. :' I:~:: . I . ... ::A:~~ii::i ii~li:::ii :i:;:l-.~:.::. :i: .i:.::?.:::l ::i:::--:i -'i^ ?:i:i.: :~ li:-: .:V ::jj ::. :::. ::.:i::: :~j~'i_ :.iiijiiiij: iil:m:i::_?:-.:::j::: ::i::--:::: : : .:j::i--: ..-.:::-:.::--j-: :::: ::..i~~i - -:;: :: j::::-::::: :: : : ::::..:iii.:Ij..I?. . :I:::::i::i:::i::-. : i:is:i::i: ':::.:i::?: :- 4i1I1?-' ss::::::?:e::.::m : '::-.: : A iii:i.ii.~t-; -::.:: i- :~ .-:-.'::. X Z- A Fig. 1. A classic dolmen at Damiyeh. All dolmen photos are by the author. 106 THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXIX The Biblical Archaeologist is published quarterly (February, May, September, December) by the American Schools of Oriental Research. Its purpose is to meet the need for a readable, non-technical, yet thoroughly reliable account of archaeological discoveries as they relate to the Bible. Editor: Edward F. Campbell, Jr., with the assistance of Floyd V. Filson in New Testament matters. Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor at 800 West Belden Avenue, Chica- go, Illinois, 60614. Editorial Board: W. F. Albright, Johns Hopkins University; G. Ernest Wright, Harvard University; Frank M. Cross, Jr., Harvard University. Subscriptions: $2.00 per year, payable to Stechert-Hafner Service Agency, 31 East 10th Street, New York, New York, 10003. Associate members of the American Schools of Oriental Research receive the journal automatically. Ten or more subscriptions for group use mailed and billed to the same address, $1.50 per year for each. Subscriptions run for the calendar year. In England: seventeen shillings per year, payable to B. H. Blackwell, Ltd., Broad Street, Oxford. Back Numbers: Available at 600 each, or $2.25 per volume, from the Stechert-Hafner Service Agency. No orders under $1.00 accepted. When ordering one issue only, please remit with order. The journal is indexed in Art Index, Index to Religious Periodical Literature, and at the end of every fifth volume of the journal itself. Second-class postage PAID at Cambridge, Massachusetts and additional offices. Copyright by American Schools of Oriental Research, 1966. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BY TRANSCRIPT PRINTING COMPANY PETERBOROUGH, N. H. Contents Dolmen Studies in Palestine, by James L. Swauger ...............................................106 Science and Archaeology, by Henry O. Thompson ..........................................114 A New Book on Masada and a Publication Notice ............................................125 Dolmen Studies in Palestine JAMESL . SWAUGER Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh Among the classes of archaeological phenomena in Palestine that cry for explanation are dolmens, hut-like structures built of large slabs of stone. We need to know (following the journalism class directive of my high school days) the who, what, where, when, why and how of these structures. So far only the what, where, and how seem clear enough. The who, when and why may engage our efforts for a long time to come. What is easy. A dolmen is a megalithic building, a usually rectangular structure consisting of a single massive horizontal "roof" stone resting on two or more equally massive vertical "wall" stones, or some variation on this theme. What can be called a "classic"d olmen is essentially a stone box made up of six slabs: one roof, two sides, two ends (one of which can be called a "door"s lab), and one floor (fig. 1). Variations occur. Some dolmens have more than one roof slab; some more than one slab making up a wall; some more than one slab serving as a floor; some slabs as inner partition walls. Door slabs often have "portholes" carved in them. Two-decker dolmens (fig. 2), dolmens with "trailers" 1966, 4) THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST 107 "ivan, ::will :*?:71 WAKi Mb vy. ...... . . .. . . too x : ........... TI owls to SO: li:iMiii~ ~~???Ojii:~N_;::. . UAZOI Fig. 2. A "double-decker" dolmen at Damiyeh. hitched on behind them (fig. 3), and even dolmens that partially use bedrock occur (fig. 4).1 Where is also easy. In Palestine, dolmens are found from the Syrian and Lebanon borders south to about the latitude of Kerak, from the Medi- terranean foothills of the central mountain ridge of Palestine east to the 1. Swauger, J. L., Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, X (1965), 5-36. 108 THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXIX desert. For all practical purposes, one can say that dolmens are not found south of the Kerak area, and this is an intriguing problem in itself. There are several thousand individual dolmens. Usually, they are found clustered in fields as at Damiyeh, Irbid, and Kefr Yuba in Jordan; Shamir, Meron, and Khorazim in Israel. Occasionally, they are found singly, and such single dolmens conceivably are the only remaining evidence of a former field of dolmens, but cursory examination of the area around one single dolmen standing above the Salt-JordanV alley road in Jordan revealed no sister structures. There are dozens of dolmen sites, some with as many as the more than two hundred structures that occur at Damiyeh or the per- haps one hundred at Meron, and some with as few as the six at Tell Umm el-Quttein (fig. 5). How is not difficult of explanation. The slabs are ordinarily massive and weigh several hundred pounds each. My experience in close study of three fields leads me to believe slabs were not moved for great distances,2 an opinion shared by another student of these phenomena, Moshe Stekelis.3 Having helped shift great blocks of stone containing dinosaur bones in Carnegie Museums storerooms,I know that men accustomed to using brute strength assisted by levers and rollers can move very heavy objects. I see no reason to postulate elaborate machinery or great engineering knowledge. At Shamir in Israel, dolmens were made by rounded boulders that could have been rolled into place easily enough. At Damiyeh in Jordan, slabs could have been slid downhill to position for the building of many of the dolmens without great effort. The stones were picked up, levered up, slid, rolled, depending on the dolmen and the location. Given time and the ex- perience of team application of human or animal muscle, those who built the dolmens probably looked on their construction only as hard work, not as an enormous task. Like the people who raised the giant statues of Easter Island,4 the dolmen builders had a secret weapon, time, which coupled with the team application of muscle, had enabled them to use heavy stone units with relative ease. Now the why. Common sense tells us dolmens were tombs. But to have common sense say they are tombs does not make them tombs. It is opinion, not proof. We know they have been used as tombs within even our own times, but we have no conclusive proof that those who built them did so in order to use them as tombs. In company with most other students of the subject, I believe dolmens were built as tombs, but I wouldn't like to be hanged on the basis of the evidence I can muster to support my belief. Nor do we know who built them. It is usually said that they were built 2. Ibid., p. 8. 3. Stekelis, M., Archives de I'Institut de Paldontologie Humaine, Memoire 15 (1935), 37. 4. Heyerdahl, T., Aku-Aku (1958), pp. 143-149. 1966, 4) THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST 109 ::: ?_i:: :_:1:j :-_.- .I ::. :.i:i.l. . . :: .: ?::: . : : . . : .. .:. . . "~j:~:1-i: ,- .- . ....:?:::-i: l-iiii::'. -i j:i~'' : i' :i: i: ... .ji'ji?::..i.::-~:i :: Fig. 3. Dolmen with a "trailer" at el-Matabi. somewhere between about 7000 and 3000 B.C. by Neolithic, even Chal- colithic, peoples in Palestine. But saying so is one thing, proof another. Artifacts have not been found in such reliable association with dolmens as to permit us to say, "Aha!T his tool was dropped here by one of the people who built this thing." Once we have such evidence, and only this kind of proof can be called conclusive, we will be in a position to say when, for who and when are intimately linked. But as of now we know neither who nor when. The who and when factors have been the subject of much speculation. Most of it hinged on attempts to equate dolmens with biblical and speci- fically Old Testament passages, places, and people, such as G. Ernest Wright's suggestion that dolmens were the basis for belief in giants, the Rephaim, Anakim, Emim, Zamzumin, and the like.5 Edwin C. Broome points out how natural this assumption would have been for the ancient Hebrews, especially if they believed the dolmens to be pagan altars.6 But 5. Wright, G. E., Journal of Biblical Literature, LVII (1938), 305-309. 6. Broome, E. C., Jr., The Dolmens of Palestine and Transjordania, doctoral dissertation, Brown University, 1940, II, 215. 110 THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXIX no satisfactory connection of dolmens with biblical peoples or chronology has yet come forth. Archaeological techniques have been of little help. W. F. Albright suggested7 that the circular huts made of great standing stones discovered by J. d'A. Waechter and V. M. Seton-Williams in the Wadi Dhobai south- east of Amman8 had served as models for dolmens. Those who made the Wadi Dhobai stone huts had a stone industry like that of the Tahunian of pre-pottery Jericho, and Albright's suggestion if proved would date the dolmens as early as about 7000 B.C. No traces of such a stone industry have been associated with dolmens, however, and the dolmen builders are not proved to be as early as the Wadi Dhobai folk. At el-'Adeimeh, Stekelis excavated stone cists with artifacts and associa- tions identified by the excavator as Chalcolithic.9 Dolmens are found nearby. Stekelis held that the cists were degenerate forms of the dolmens and that both were of about the same age, the latter part of the Stone Age in Pales- tine. C. C. McCown pointed out that the el-'Adeimeh cists are not in them- selves megaliths, are not necessarily inspired by dolmens, and are not neces- sarily related to them.10 Structures we recorded at Tel lel-Matabi in 1962" very much resembled Stekelis' el-'Adeimeh cists. They were in the same field with numerous dolmens, and at first glance I was inclined to agree with Stekelis that the cists are associated with the dolmens and may be related to them as chronological and degenerate successors. But McCown cautioned that French megalithic stone cists of later times are much like the el-'Adeimeh cists12 and from my own experience I can testify that they are much like Middle Woodland stone cist burials of Indians of the north- eastern United States; neither of these can be readily viewed as related to Palestinian dolmens. My interest in the dolmen problem in Palestine was spurred by Dr. James L. Kelso of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In 1959 he sug- gested the possibility of my undertaking a dolmen study in Palestine. His thought was that persons like myself at home in American Indian arch- aeology, in which one works without literary guides, might make some sense out of Palestinian dolmens, to which literature has furnished so few guides. Kelso warned me that while there are many references to dolmens in literature, nothing significant had been proved regarding their chronological or cultural position. This situation is true for Syria and Lebanon, as well 7. Albright, W. F., The Archaeology of Palestine (4th ed., 1960), p. 64. 8. Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, XVIII (1938), 172-185, 297, 298. 9. Stekelis, pp. 77-79. 10. McCown, C. C., The Ladder of Progress in Palestine (1934), pp. 292f. 11. Swauger, pp. 30-34. 12. McCown, p. 292. 1966, 4) THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST 111 .:X -x, .:::: :::j Wix- ?:1i-:'A:S : :c?'rR:~::" .sW.1~~,i.8::i:-~l:: ' ~-? ::i:::_:: :::j:: ?:a :; g.~: :iii' -4 ip,::: ilr:a ,4i A?1 1-) ? ..- .. ?. X::w:m 'xP*B~-~* ---l MT? ~ ~ iow i;P r.Z. i::8:x:: *-ilVx Q~:f31:-:.; nn:?:::> ;WZ1 , ~~li;~:i~iii$g~OgX:;~~I~ ?- ~?i -~ "~La~aas~s~ esn ~ lds ~8s- WRO--.: i:1 ?M. ?V Fig. 4. Dolmen adapted from a natural rock fissure at Damiyeh. as Jordan and Israel (Palestine proper) which engaged my attention. The bibliography now accumulated has dozens of titles, and their contents sup- port Kelso's opinion. Some of the publications are based on field observa- tion, but many of them are not, and speculation is their meat. In large measure reports on megalith sites in Palestine have been ancillary to reports concerning other phenomena. Sporadic interest seldom results in reliable conclusions. What the dolmens have needed was someone to make them his special study. 112 THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXIX The crux of the matter is that until we have acceptable datable arti- fact association with typical dolmens or have found some method of tying dolmens into established chronological or cultural niches we are where we were in 1961 when I discussed the matter in correspondencew ith Albright, and he wrote (April 19, 1961) saying he had not seen a report of a really scientific investigation of the dolmens and that he doubted one had been made. Many investigators, Albright, Nelson Glueck, G. L. Harding, and C. R. Conder, to name but four of the more prominent, have noted, described, and speculated concerning some of them. Stekelis and others excavated dolmens and dolmen-like structures. Broome made them a major part of his doctoral dissertation submitted at Brown University in May 1940, and published concerning them in The Journal of Biblical Literature.13Y et to none of them but Stekelis and Broome-who had not seen a dolmen in the field-were megaliths of primaryi nterest. In 1959 and 1960, I first looked at Palestinian dolmens, those all in Jordan. From March 15 to April 15, 1962, I led a small party in searching for and visiting dolmen fields on both banks of the Jordan River in Jordan. After looking at fields for the first ten days of this period from the northern border of the Dead Sea to Irbid, we concentrated on three fields, Damiyeh, Tell Umm el-Quttein and Tell el-Matabi, the first a bit east of north from Jericho, the other two almost due east (fig. 5). In Israel I have spent time at the great sites of Meron, Shamir, and Khorazim. A detailed report on the three fields east of Jericho was recently pub- lished in the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. There is no point in repeating all details here, but a review of some tangible re- sults of a few weeks work concentrating on three sites might be interesting: 1. Three general types of dolmen construction, each peculiar to one of the three sites, were identified. 2. Four distinct architecturals tyles were identified at Damiyeh. 3. Three distinct architecturals tyles were identified at el-Matabi. 4. Surface collecting at the sites gave no clue as to their age or the culture of their builders. 5. The only relationship between the orientation of dolmens and any pattern in construction is that at Damiyeh doors are in the north slabs of north-to-south oriented dolmens, in the east slabs of east-to-west oriented dolmens. 6. At Damiyeh there is a change in architectural styles from north-to- south but I have no evidence yet to suggest that the northern section of the area studied is either older or younger than the southern. 13. Broome, Journal of Biblical Literature, LIX (1940), 479-497. 1966, 4) THE BIBLICALA RCHAEOLOGIST 113 SIDON ) AMASCUS r (cid:127)D/ TYRE /- *SHAMIR S Y R I A MERON ACRE KHORAZIM HAIFA TIBERIAUS MEDITSERERAANEAoN0 NAZARETH KEFRY USBoIAR BID CAESAREA \ I oNABLUS JAFFA * DAMIYEH 0SALI AMMAN 0. JERIoC HO EL QUTTEIN *EL MATABI ASHDOD JERUSALEM / I/ ADEIMEH PADEIMEH BETHLEHEM "AA O oHEBRON BEERSHEBA o KERAK PA ESTINE 0 5 10 15 20 25 SCAILNEM ILES Fig. 5. Map showing in heavy letters the locations of dolmen fields in Jordan and Israel. By going patiently from one dolmen to the next in field after field after field, determining their individual characteristics and charting them, learning whether or not there are patterns of construction and orientation within fields, which fields are like other fields, excavating when such ex- 114 THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXIX cavation bids fair to provide acceptable artifact-dolmen association or to reveal architectural details impossible to learn otherwise, we may eventually answer the who, when and why of our problem. Unless we are lucky enough to find a dolmen under an earth or rock cover (for they may have been so covered originally) and to find it unvandalized, I know no other procedure that can result in solving the mysteryo f the dolmens. Science And Archaeology HENRYO . THOMPSON Syracuse University One of the most fascinating developments in the archaeological world over the past several decades has been the astounding increase in the number of ways in which science has been contributing to the discipline. Now, of course, archaeology has claim as a science in its own right. But new and old theories and techniques of other sciences are now being applied in archaeologyi n ways and to a degree that is really astonishing. All will have heard of Carbon-14 and most persons interested in arch- aeology know something about tree ring dating (dendrochronology), al- though it is normally related to the American Southwest. Apart from these, my own introduction to this rapidly expanding field came in an address by Dr. Froelich Rainey of the Pennsylvania University Museum in the spring of 1963. Among other things, he described the use of the proton magne- tometer in the Museum's hunt for the lost city of Sybaris, and the testing of a newly opened tomb in Mexico for bacteria. Dr. Rainey is the Director of the Applied Science Center for Archaeology. The Center both develops and experiments with new techniques in archaeological research. These in- clude new methods of exploration, dating, identification, and interpretation. The Center publishes the MASCA (Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology) Newsletter (1:1 dated February, 1965; 1:2 dated Dec., 1965) which is itself a mine of information. It is preparedb y Miss Jeannette Flamm, and is designed to cover current literature on the subject and to be a clearing house for developments in this area. In Great Britain, the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford University publishes a bulletin called Archaeo- metry. Volume 7 (1964) is still available but volumes 1-6 are out of print. A glance at the table of contents of this small annual is a dizzying record of the vastness and complex character of this area of archaeological re- search. Volume 7 includes articles on X-ray analysis, magnetic surveying, fission-track dating of glasses, thermoluminescent dating of pottery, spec- trographic analysis of stamped jar handles, stereoscopic photography, etc.