Biblical Archeology, Volume 2: Dating Techniques In Archeology: An Intro, by Dr. Jonson C. Philip and Dr. Saneesh Cherian

I downloaded this book for free from Amazon for my kindle, and it took me a while to get around to reading it. It was worth the wait, though it is an exceedingly short book that would have been a bit difficult to justify paying more than a dollar or two for in the best of circumstances. That said, for what it is, it is a good value and offered some new information to me, despite its diminutive size. Most of what I would have expected in a book on biblical archeology, namely why it is worthwhile to study, appeared in the first volume, which I have not yet seen. The first volume, rather sensibly, seems to include more justification, while the second volume lives up to its title and looks at dating techniques.

The book is divided, rather sensibly, between relative and absolute dating techniques. After a scathing discussion about the origins of “scientific” archeology in what amounted to grave robbing and thievery, the book then spends about half of its space discussing relative dating techniques (among the more interesting ones were cultural affiliation dating, which measures dating by the cultural context, and pollen analysis, although many other means of dating are discussed, some of them as exotic as looking at the patina difference between scraped and unscraped rock areas in cave paintings). The second half of the book discusses absolute dating techniques, from astronomical dating to tree ring analysis (or dendrochronology), to racemization (an interesting way to measure the decay of amino acids in protein), closing with the most famous dating method of all, carbon dating. Each of the methods is given a brief description that includes ways in which they would be helpful.

Although this particular e-book is exceedingly short, it is a worthwhile resource for students of biblical archeology for two reasons. The first is to remind us that archeology (like many sciences) has a shady past that harmed the development of sound knowledge by destroying the value of many artifacts by plundering them and removing them from their context and site. Second, this is a handy and short guide that can inform its readers of various techniques on dating, as well as their limitations, that can help readers be more informed when they read articles or books about archeology that discuss dating. The fact that the book praises such luminaries in archeology like Flinders Petrie, FJ Bliss, and W.F. Albright (for his foundational role in pottery analysis) can only be a good thing as well.