"Presented in this volume are papers delivered at a conference of the Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University entitled 'The archaeology of Israel: constructing the past, interpreting the present' held on the Lehigh campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, May 22-24, 1994"--Introd.

Includes bibliographies and indexes.

Introduction / Neil Asher Silberman and David B. Small -- Politics and archaeology / Amos Elon -- Archaeology, political culture, and culture in Israel / Yaacov Shavit -- Structuring the past : Israelis, Palestinians, and the symbolic authority of archaeological monuments / Neil Asher Silberman -- Historical imaginings, ideological gestures : W.F. Albright and the 'reasoning faculties of man' / Burke O. Long -- Tel Miqne-Ekron : an Iron Age I Philistine settlement in Canaan / Trude Dothan -- The Yigael Yadin memorial excavations at Hazor, 1990-93 : aims and preliminary results / Amnon Ben-Tor -- Discoveries at Tel Dor / Ephraim Stern -- The excavations at Tel Beth Shean during the years 1989-94 / Amihai Mazar -- The revolutionary effects of archaeology on the study of Jewish history : the case of the ancient synagogue / Lee I. Levine -- Jewish ritual baths : interpreting the digs and the texts : some issues in the social history of Second Temple Judaism / Benjamin G. Wright III -- Pots and people revisited : ethnic boundaries in the Iron Age I / Israel Finkelstein -- Can pig remains be used for ethnic diagnosis in the ancient Near East? / Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish -- Group identification and ethnicity in the construction of the early state of Israel : from the outside looking in / David B. Small -- Philology, theology, and archaeology : what kind of history do we want, and what is possible? / William G. Dever -- Text and artifact : two monologues? / Baruch Halpern.