Friday, August 22, 2003

ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE has a new issue online (56.5). Unfortunately, it includes only abstracts of the major articles - no full texts. But one of these, "Faking Biblical History", sounds interesting if you want to go find the paper copy at your local library. Also, the editorial by President Jane C. Waldbaum, "Basement Archaeology," is given in full and is definitely worth a read. I've generally been sympathetic to the idea of selling run-of-the-mill finds like potsherds and common coins after an excavation has been published, but she presents some good arguments against that view, based on her work on Greek artifacts found at sites in Israel. Maybe one solution, increasingly made practical by the cheapness of electronic publishing, would be to publish at least good photographs of all recovered artifacts, no matter how common or trivial. Of course, the problem would remain that any sold artifacts would no longer be available for new types of physical analysis, which are likely to become rife in coming decades with the development of molecular technologies.

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