Word: archaeologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Exciting stuff but almost certainly fictional. Traill, who has studied Schliemann for nearly 20 years, first became skeptical of the archaeologist's veracity in 1978, when he found an eyewitness account Schliemann wrote about a San Francisco fire. Schliemann lived in California in the early 1850s, amassing a fortune as a banker during the gold rush (he also made millions as an indigo trader and a sometimes shady profiteer in Russia during the Crimean War). But the fire occurred while Schliemann was out of town, and a month earlier than the report said...
...highways and the towns that line them have long since been eclipsed by the Interstate and strips of EconoLodges and Burger Kings. For modern cruise-control motorists, the fractured skeleton of the U.S. highway system has been relegated to the realm of the cultural archaeologist, a reminder of how Americans used to travel before the age of the jug handle and the clover leaf...
...Biblique, would have reverberated politically and economically through the entire region. And considering that artifacts from as far back as the late Stone Age have turned up in the Sinai , it is perplexing that no evidence of the Israelites' passage has been found. William Dever, a University of Arizona archaeologist, flatly calls Moses a mythical figure. Some scholars even insist the story was a political fabrication, invented to unite the disparate tribes living in Canaan through a falsified heroic past...
Instead, argues Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, the settlement of the Promised Land was a gradual process over a long period, and involved people both from within Canaan and from outside. "Some came from the Hittite country, some from the desert to the east and some from the south," he says. "I would also accept the idea that a core emanated from Egypt, and these people brought with them the idea of monotheism." Only after they had united in a sort of tribal league did they become the Israelites, and while they undoubtedly fought their neighbors for territory...
...even be called the Holy Grail of biblical archaeology - is a royal archive from before the time of King David or King Solomon. No such archive has ever been located inside Israel, although surrounding countries have yielded many from the same era. Sighs Amnon Ben-Tor, a Hebrew University archaeologist: "It's like striking oil. Everywhere but here...