Word: gluecks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Once Glueck won the freedom of the desert, though, he found himself in an archaeological paradise. He wandered through the ancient lands on the far side of the Jordan, Bible in hand, and everywhere he found traces of ancient people. Usually potsherds told him who they were. Other explorers may have reported a ruined fortress on a hill and a low tell beyond it. If inscriptions were lacking, as they generally were, only vague guesses, based on general appearance, could set the age of the find. Glueck was the first to determine that the fort was built in the reign...
...They Live? As his experience increased, Glueck developed an almost infallible knack for finding sites of ancient communities. First he looked for springs or waterholes. In that dusty land, every source of water is sure to attract settlers. He also followed the trails of modern Bedouins. "The coun try has not changed," he says, "so they still use the same paths that were followed in ancient times." He kept asking himself how they lived. "Were there caravan routes going through? You have to have a good reason for each settlement...
Edom and Moab were almost unin habited when Glueck started his survey, but he was sure that if they were strong enough at the time of the Exodus to repel the redoubtable Israelites, they must have been well armed and well
Summer after summer Glueck returned to find and date hundreds of such sites, and to his growing amazement he noted that none contained types of pottery older than 1300 B.C. and therefore the sites themselves could not be older. The date of the Exodus, deduced from legend and doubtful Egyptian records, has often been given as early as 1500 B.C. But Glueck's potsherds proved that at that time the Israelites could have marched through Edom and Moab with hardly any opposition. If Edom was too strong for them, as the Bible says, they must have arrived...
Surface Man. Throughout his explorations, Glueck remained a "surface man," which means that he covered large areas, guided by reason, tradition and literary clues, and learned what he could from surface finds. The "digger" school deplores this approach as super ficial. Nothing counts, say the diggers, until the careful, laborious toil of exca vation has extracted every droplet of evidence. To the strict diggers, the edu cated estimates of the surface men are all too fallible. The balanced truth is that each method has advantages, de pending on the nature of the country and the sites...