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

Typical of biblical archaeology, the debate over Iron Age chronology was always based on a mixture of pure archaeological analysis on the one hand and attempted correlations with biblical and extra-biblical sources on the other. It started with the University of Chicago Oriental Institute excavations at Megiddo during the 1930s, when the excavators identified the ‘chariot city’ of Stratum IV as Solomonic. In 1940, John Crowfoot, in light of his excavations at Samaria, called for a lowering of the date of Megiddo Stratum IV to the Omride period, due to the architectural similarity between Samaria and Megiddo (Crowfoot 1940; see Franklin [Chapter 18, this volume] for a similar view).