ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Depth of Field: How Excavation Became Science among Victorian Biblical Archaeologists

• In Event: Histories of Archaeology 1

English Abstract

In 1904, William Flinders Petrie claimed that his stratigraphic excavations in Egypt represented biblical archaeology’s first scientific iteration. But previous biblical archaeologists had long viewed excavation as a non-analytic precursor to their true scientific work of linguistic decipherment. So, how did excavation here surpass philology as a scientific practice? Answering this question reveals some of the ways insights from diverse scientific fields could influence one another at the end of the nineteenth century.

Petrie had been hired by the Egypt Exploration Fund to map and excavate antiquities. The Fund framed this in religious and protectionist terms for their audience of middle-class financiers, arguing that everything old had to be “saved” for European museums because it might corroborate Old Testament narratives. While some scholars eschewed this “sentimental” attitude, Petrie argued that if excavators adopted the geological practice of saving stratigraphic data, they could illuminate time periods not described in writing. Where philology came up short, excavation promised insight, but only when meticulously measured.

This approach answered a subtly new archaeological question. Where philology had offered scientific proof of the names and dates of ancient kings, stratigraphic excavations provided evidence for chronologies of ancient cultural practices. Ironically, Petrie’s adoption of geological techniques reclassified excavation as a form of biblical archaeological scientific analysis precisely because of the Egypt Exploration Fund’s déclassé emphasis on “protecting” Egyptian antiquities. This story therefore reveals both how techniques could bleed between scientific fields to reorient them, and how popular interests and scientific work could intertwine in the process.

Author

• Faridah Laffan, Cornell University