A Biography of Kathleen Kenyon, the Renowned Biblical Archaeologist - Essay Example

A Biography of Kathleen Kenyon, the Renowned Biblical Archaeologist May 12th A Biography of Kathleen Kenyon, the Renowned Biblical Archaeologist Introduction The archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon is one of the most well-known European academics who have devoted their lives to researching the ancient history of the area known as the Holy Land. In a recent, somewhat quirky biography, she is described as “a modest woman who had confidence in her own judgement, a kind woman who did not suffer fools easily, and a pioneer in her discipline who many found insufficiently ‘academic’. She was known for her love of dogs, pink gin, and digging.”1 Kathleen Kenyon was certainly unconventional by the standards of her Edwardian youth, and it is this determination to step aside from the restrictions of convention in her work as much as in her private life which made her such a significant contributor to the field of biblical archaeology. Birth, Education, and Youth It seems that from the moment of her birth, Kathleen Kenyon was destined to follow a career in the field of biblical archaeology. She was born on the 5th of January, 1906, as the eldest daughter of the eminent but rather shy biblical scholar, Sir Frederic Kenyon. The family was an ancient one, with lands in Shropshire; the Greek and Latin scholar Frederic and his wife had a family home in Harrow-on- the-Hill near London.2 This was an academic household with many books and an expectation that all members of the family would take an interest in things to do with history and the Christian faith. Kathleen’s father went on to take up a post of a director of the British Museum in London, giving the family a connection with all the greatest treasures in British archaeological history. The young Kathleen and her younger sister, Nora, had a conventional upper class childhood with governesses coming to teach them at home at first, followed by attendance at exclusive girls’ schools: first a provincial one during the war, and then the highly academic Saint Paul’s Girls’ School where Greek and Latin were taught to prepare the students for entry into Oxford and Cambridge Universities.3 This was in many ways a charmed early life, so that, despite the events of the First World War, Kathleen Kenyon enjoyed an idyllic childhood and access to some of the best education that money could buy. The moral and religious values of this family along with a tendency towards studious activities remained with Kathleen as she grew into adulthood, and she was a churchgoer throughout her later life. The schooling that Kathleen received and her own hard work at her studies ensured that she was accepted at Somerville College Oxford to study history. This was, as was typical at that time, a segregated institution which looked after the lodgings and welfare of its all-female student population, although students also attended mixed lectures across the whole of the university. The value of such a high status family upbringing was to prove critical in other ways also, because the young Kathleen came to know various eminent scholars and researchers through family connections. This key advantage led to her first experience of actual fieldwork, because she used these connections to get to know expedition leaders and acquire junior positions on their trips. Excavations In her early twenties, Kathleen participated in an archaeological excavation in what was then Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), and then became part of a team led by the renowned British archaeologists couple, Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler, which was excavating ancient Roman remains at St. Albans in the South of England. The man, Mortimer Wheeler, taught her his methods and became a mentor for her, guiding her to take up the latest scientific methods. This activity was broken off by the advent of the Second World War, in which Kathleen performed the duties as an administrator of the London Institute of Archaeology affiliated to the University of London; she also participated in volunteer activities with the Red Cross during the Blitz.4 It was during the wartime service that she met a woman who was to become her lifelong friend and companion, Vivienne Catleugh. The two women lived together when Kathleen was in Britain, and this gave Kathleen a home base to come back to after long periods abroad. There was some difficulty in gaining access to sites in the Holy Land in the 1940s because of the political turmoil surrounding the Israeli War of Independence. This, along with some rather radical political views, explains Kathleen’s anti Zionist and rather pro-Arab stance on contemporary affairs in the region, and she was known for writing letters to the press and the authorities about territorial issues involving Israeli authorities. In 1951, Kathleen went to the East of the Israeli region, to an area of Jordanian desert, to carry out what was to become her most famous work – the excavation at Jericho which lasted from 1952 to 1958. Kenyon directed the diggers to excavate small squares, about 5 meters by 5 meters, and to leave some spaces between them unexcavated, so that the archaeologists could view the way the finds were located within the deposits.5 The key contribution that this excavation made was to provide evidence of very early settlements in the West Bank area around Jericho. This was the material from the Neolithic Age that provided exciting evidence of locations recorded in the Old Testament. Later, when Kenyon moved to other sites in the Middle East, she worked on Iron Age and early Bronze Age sites as well, which gave her a very comprehensive understanding of the archaeology of this region over vast periods of time. Few other archaeologists have managed to span such a huge range and make so valuable contributions in a single career. Major contributions to archaeology and to biblical scholarship It is for her work in the Middle East that Kathleen Kenyon is best known. Part of the reason for this lies in her thorough application of new methods of excavation which allowed a fuller and more accurate picture of the whole site to be obtained. The key insight that Kenyon applied was the necessary inclusion of surrounding details in the investigation of artefacts, because this otherwise useless material could give reliable clues as to the order of deposits, and even, with the help of carbon dating and other techniques, fix the dates of specific layers detectable in the ground. She stated categorically that “The science of excavation is dependent on the interpretation of the stratification of a site, that is to say, the layers of soil associated with it.”6 In the years immediately following the Second World War, this caused a major shift to occur – “...through the mid-century the contributions of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Dame Kathleen Kenyon became formative. In bringing to bear the principles of debris analysis and of three-dimensional recording, Wheeler/Kenyon methods added significant nuance to the processing and registering of stratigraphic data, demanding more detail regarding the history and origins of deposits that surrounded structural elements.”7 The items of pottery or other man-made artefacts can be situated within a context that can be reconstructed chronologically through a vertical section. This approach brings together art-history style comparison and analysis with very precise scientific measurements and has major implications for all archaeological fieldwork. In Jerusalem, Kathleen was not as successful as she had been elsewhere in the Holy Land. She conducted seven seasons of excavations between 1961 and 1967 but produced little in the way of major finds. Critics note that although she completed significant amounts of investigation around the Armenian Garden area, she failed to spot the fact that this was in fact the location of the palace of Herod the Great as well as the palace of the Crusader rulers of Jerusalem.8 There were issues surrounding permissions to dig in this crowded city location, and complications caused by Israeli archaeologists insisting on different methods and obtaining more extended access to the sites that Kathleen worked on. It is nowadays generally agreed that some of her conclusions were over-optimistic in relation to the actual finds in her Jerusalem sites, and some conclusions plainly wrong. Davis ascribes this to the application of techniques which worked well out in the Jordanian desert but were less well suited to the multi-layered occupations of the city sites.9 These disputes have tarnished Kathleen’s later reputation, particularly with Israelis scholars, but they do not detract from the very significant work that she did earlier in her career. Reputation and Awards Kathleen Kenyon will be remembered mainly for her discoveries and her publications, which detail in particular the method that she used to gain every scrap of evidence from each archaeological site. She helped to move the discipline away from a destructive kind of treasure hunting that valued the retrieval of valuable objects and towards a much more scientific search for accurate knowledge about the distant past. Her endeavours helped to establish the historicity of many places that are mentioned in the biblical narratives, and her books have served to educate and inspire many a young scholar, no doubt motivating some to take up a career in archaeology. Her greatest achievement, however, is in her pursuit of a rigorous method that preserved all kinds of tiny details about each site. As technology has progressed still further in the years since her death in 1978, the appropriateness of her approach is now being fully realized. Samples and facts carefully recorded in her excavations now form a part of a much bigger scientific picture of the whole region and its layers of past history. Without her dogged attention to detail, much would have been lost, and scholarship would have been the poorer because of that. Oxford university awarded Kathleen a doctorate on the basis of her many publications, and a number of other institutions awarded honorary doctorates as recognition for her services to archaeology. Other major achievements include the award of the Grand Officer of the Order of Istiqlal, which was conferred on her by King Hussein of Jordan, and of course the British government’s honouring of her lifetime achievement by making her a Dame of the British Empire in 1973.10 These awards recognize not only her professional activities, but also her work in the War and her support for education in London and later in Oxford, where she became a college principal. Later Life Kathleen Kenyon never married and had no children, but she would no doubt be satisfied with her contribution to the education of countless others through her work. After spending most of her middle years in various archaeological activities, Kathleen went back to the UK and took up a position as principle of St Hugh’s College in Oxford in her later years. Perhaps because of the sedentary nature of her administrative activities and the convenience and availability of college food, with all the entertaining that came with that role, she put on weight in her fifties and sixties.11 This, along with a lifelong habit of smoking and drinking, contributed to her death at the age of only 72. Kathleen Kenyon published dozens of books, papers, and monographs, but the sheer volume of material that she uncovered in her many long excavations proved too much even for her phenomenal energy. The mounds of scientific evidence defied swift analysis, and this contributed also to delays in bringing discoveries to the press. Added to this was the burden of a lecturing career which distracted her from the research side of her work. She has not managed to complete the writing up of her work in Jerusalem, though she was active in scholarship right up to the end of her life. Conclusion In summing up Kathleen Kenyon’s life, it would be easy to dismiss her achievement as a logical outcome of privilege and wealth rather than any major contribution of character. It is true that there was an initially favourable starting point in her life, but, at the same time, it must be recognized that she did not choose the comfortable life of the scholar in the way that her father did, but rather put up with the hardships of archaeological digs, often in very hot and primitive conditions, in order to participate fully in the back-breaking hard work of excavation. This determination and her willingness to take on administrative and fund raising tasks shows that she used her great gifts to the full, sacrificing her own comfort for the good of each mission. This makes Kathleen Kenyon a role model for many people and an example of dedication to practical work in the service of academic goals. She aspired to a career that had hitherto been dominated by men and refused to be put off by the many hindrances that stood in the way of her work. Above all, she became known as one of the best in her field, which is a testament to her ability and dedication. References Broshi, Magen. “Archaeology, Dogs and Gin: Dame Kathleen Kenyon, Digging up the Holy Land” (Review). Bible History Daily, last modified 21 March 2012. Retrieved from: http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/reviews/dame-kathleen-kenyon-digging-up-the-holy-land/ Callaway, Joseph A. “Dame Kathleen Kenyon, 1906-1978.” The Biblical Archaeologist 42 (2), (1979): 122-125. Currid, John D. Doing Archaeology in the Land of the Bible: A Basic Guide. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999. Davis, Miriam C. Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging up the Holy Land. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008. Kenyon, Kathleen. Digging Up Jericho: The Results of the Jericho Excavations, 1952-1956. New York: Praeger, 1957. Seger, Joe D. “The Point One Principle: A Case Study from the Halif Terrace”. In Retrieving the Past: Essays on Archaeological Research and Methodology, edited by Joe D. Seger, 245-268. Cobb Institute of Archaeology: Mississippi State University Press. Read More