1777
More than Antiquity: How Archaeologists
See
Raphael Greenberg
Abstract I attempt to characterize the shared foundations of archaeology, in light
of the signifcant fragmentation of the discipline, the expansion of its chronological
reach from deep antiquity to the present and of its scale and resolution from micro
to macro, and the urgent call for its decolonization. I briefy explore the intersec-
tions of archaeological practice with the archaeosphere, temporality, memory, and
archive, and locate the infection point of personal values in the interface between
archaeological epistemology—how archaeologists see and interpret the world—and
praxis—how they go about creating the archaeological record.
Keywords Archaeological epistemology · Archaeosphere · Temporality · Archive
· Memory · Forgetting
1 Introduction
If we follow the standard histories of Levantine archaeology, the generation of
archaeologists who came of age in the late 1970s—a generation to which both the
author and this volume’s honoree belong—has seen the feld transformed by several
“paradigm shifts,” moving from a focus on biblical culture history, to one on feld
method and data accumulation, to more explicit concerns with social evolution, and
then to a close alliance with sciences and big data. The chapters of P.R.S. Moorey’s
A Century of Biblical Archaeology (Moorey, 1992) take us from “New Nations,
New Methods” (after WWII), to “The Passing of the Old Order” (in the early 1980s),
and fnally to “The Growing Impact of Natural and Social Sciences” (early 1990s).
Apprehend, discern, grasp, understand, realize, know, form an opinion.
R. Greenberg (*)
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
e-mail: graf@tauex.tau.ac.il
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
E. Ben-Yosef, I. W. N. Jones (eds.), “And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job
12:12): Essays on Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond in
Honor of Thomas E. Levy, Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27330-8_75