Word: kenyon
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...most dramatic events chronicled in the Old Testament, but for generations scholars have debated whether the Israelites' assault on Jericho was fact or myth. Over the past three decades, the consensus has gone against the biblical version. The late British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon established in the 1950s that while the ancient city was indeed destroyed, it happened around 1550 B.C., some 150 years before Joshua could have shown...
...archaeologist Bryant Wood, writing in the March/April issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, claims that Kenyon was wrong. Based on a re-evaluation of her research, which was published in detail only recently, Wood says that the city's walls could have come tumbling down at just the right time to match the biblical account. While that does not prove that the event happened, it does give plausibility to the Old Testament version...
...Kenyon's dating of Jericho's destruction was based largely on the fact that she failed to find a type of decorative pottery, imported from Cyprus, that was popular in the region around 1400 B.C. Its absence, she reasoned, meant that the city had long since become uninhabited. But Wood, an ancient-pottery expert now at the University of Toronto, argues that Kenyon's excavations were made in a poorer part of the city, where the expensive imported pottery would have been absent in any case. And he says that other pottery, dug up in Jericho in the 1930s...
Except for the disputed dating, Kenyon's discoveries at Jericho were largely consistent with the Bible story. For one thing, she found that the city's walls had fallen in a way suggestive of sudden collapse. Many scholars think the destruction was caused by an earthquake, which could also account for a temporary damming of the Jordan River described in the Bible. Moreover, Kenyon found bushels of grain on the site. That is consistent with the Bible's assertions that Jericho was conquered quickly. If the city had capitulated after a long siege, the grain would have been used...
...supervisors have adamantly denied any racial jiggering of district boundaries. They refuse to consider expanding the board to seven members, as their critics have suggested. And they resist the idea of creating a new, predominantly Latino district, which is what the plaintiffs are asking U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon to do. Such a plan, says Supervisor Peter Schabarum, would be "fundamentally un-American" and "racist." He adds, "I have real trouble with a Voting Rights Act that says ethnic groups ought to have a district fashioned just so they can have one of theirs representing them...