A Thrice-Told Tel
A Thrice-Told Tel
The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis
This chapter examines the use of archaeology to shed light on the history of the Israelites from whom the Jews emerged—a process of “ethnogenesis”—by focusing on an archaeological expedition currently underway at the site of Tel Beth Shemesh in Israel. In its nineteenth-century context, ethnogenesis involved variations of what Charles Darwin termed “descent with modification”: humans were originally divided into a much smaller number of races or primitive social groups that evolved into a larger number of races or nations over time. The chapter first considers the work of Israeli archaeologists Zvi Lederman and Shlomo Bunimovitz, with emphasis on their proposed conception of Israelite ethnogenesis, before discussing ethnogenesis as racial evolution, the decline of racial ethnogenesis, and the emergence of a new ethnogenesis from the first to the second and third archaeological excavations to Beth Shemesh.
Keywords: archaeology, Israelites, Jews, archaeological expedition, Tel Beth Shemesh, Israel, ethnogenesis, Zvi Lederman, Shlomo Bunimovitz, archaeological excavation
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