Redemption in the Land of Archaeological Sin: great excavators in the Middle East during the 1920s

Abstract

Mortimer Wheeler’s account of his introduction of systematic digging methods in archaeology has proved durable over the sixty years since its publication. In particular, Wheeler was dismissive of the efforts of pioneer excavators in the Middle East. It has long been considered that this quandary was not redressed until the 1950s when his most notable student, Kathleen Kenyon, introduced stratigraphic excavation methods to the Levant. By tracing the careers of two great excavators of the 1920s, Dorothy Garrod and Gertrude Caton Thompson, this article seeks to show that the arrival of high-quality stratigraphic methods in the Middle East was a more complex process than has been claimed.