The debate over the chronology of the Iron Age in the Southern Levant: Its history, the current situation, and a suggested resolution

The subject of the Oxford conference—the chronology of the Iron Age of the southern Levant in the 12th-9th centuries BCE in light of current debates and 14C dating—is of great interest among a wide circle of scholars from various disciplines, since it has a variety of implications for related fields of research. The subject is important for the archaeology of the Levant, Cyprus, and Greece; it has farreaching implications for the utilization of archaeology in the study of the emergence of various ethnic and geo-political units of the period, such as ancient Israel, the Philistines, the Phoenician citystates, the Aramean states and the Transjordanian states of Ammon, Moab, and Edom. The subject is essential for proper evaluation of correlations and contradictions between archaeology and the biblical text. The focus of this volume should be on the dating of the transition from the Iron Age I to the Iron Age II and the duration of the sub-period widely known today as the Iron Age IIA. To estimate the latter, we need solid relative chronology and as precise as possible absolute dates for certain occupation strata, regional pottery assemblages, and architectural complexes. More than thirty excavated sites in Israel and Jordan are available for comparative study. They differ in the quantity of data recovered and published, the quality of the excavation, and the state of publication, but together they represent a huge puzzle, the pieces of which have to be correlated and integrated into a comprehensive picture.