Radiocarbon, Vol 00, Nr 00, 2019, p 1–18 DOI:10.1017/RDC.2019.5 © 2019 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona LACHISH FORTIFICATIONS AND STATE FORMATION IN THE BIBLICAL KINGDOM OF JUDAH IN LIGHT OF RADIOMETRIC DATINGS Yosef Garfinkel 1* • Michael G Hasel 2 • Martin G Klingbeil 2 • Hoo-Goo Kang 3 • Gwanghyun Choi 1 • Sang-Yeup Chang 1 • Soonhwa Hong 4 • Saar Ganor 5 • Igor Kreimerman 1 • Christopher Bronk Ramsey 6 1 Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel 2 Institute of Archaeology, Southern Adventist University, USA 3 Seoul Jangsin University, Korea 4 Institute of Bible Geography of Korea, Korea 5 Israel Antiquities Authority, Israel 6 Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, UK ABSTRACT. When and where the process of state formation took place in the biblical kingdom of Judah is heavily debated. Our regional project in the southwestern part of Judah, carried out from 2007 to the present, includes the excavation of three Iron Age sites: Khirbet Qeiyafa, Tel Lachish, and Khirbet al-Ra’i. New cultural horizons and new fortification systems have been uncovered, and these discoveries have been dated by 59 radiometric determinations. The controversial question of when the kingdom was able to build a fortified city at Lachish, its foremost center after Jerusalem, is now resolved thanks to the excavation of a previously unknown city wall, dated by radiocarbon ( 14 C) to the second half of the 10th century BCE. KEYWORDS: Iron Age, Kingdom of Judah, Khirbet al-Ra’i, Khirbet Qeiyafa, Lachish, radiometric chronology. INTRODUCTION The debate over the chronology of the Iron Age is one of the central controversies in the current scholarship of the archaeology of the southern Levant as well as biblical studies. A solid chronology is crucial for researching various topics, such as settlement patterns, demography, economy, administration, correlation of events known from Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources with archaeological data, and the historicity of events mentioned in the biblical tradition. Despite the great efforts invested in the construction of a chronology for the southern Levant, many of the early events in the history of the Kingdom of Judah are still dated by hypothetical historical considerations. A major question is when the kingdom spread from Jerusalem in the hill country to the lower Shephelah region in the southwest (Garfinkel et al. 2012, 2015; Sergi 2013; Na’ aman 2013; Lehmann and Niemann 2014). This fertile and densely occupied zone became the backbone of the kingdom (Figure 1). Radiocarbon ( 14 C) dating for the Iron Age in the southern Levant was introduced more than a decade ago in order to resolve the disputes. Some progress has been made toward an agreed chronology for the northern kingdom of Israel (Levy and Higham 2005; Sharon et al. 2007; Mazar 2012), however, it is still not the case for the southern kingdom of Judah. The main problem lies in the quantity and quality of radiometric data from Judah. As a rule, each chronological phase is represented by only one or two samples, and many samples come from unclear contexts in old excavations (Finkelstein and Piasetzky 2010; Asscher et al. 2015; Boaretto et al. 2016). Some studies have tried to overcome this problem by modeling the dating of periods with the help of data from the entire southern Levant, lumping together Judah, Israel, and Philistia. These dating models assume that cultural changes occurred in different places at the same time, an assumption that largely overlooks regional variations. Our study, on the contrary, deals with one small region: the Judean lowland. *Corresponding author. Email: garfinkel@mscc.huji.ac.il. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2019.5 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Radiocarbon Editorial Board, on 30 Apr 2019 at 15:04:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at