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Kathleen Kenyon
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Kathleen Kenyon was the next archaeologist after Garstang to excavate in Jericho. She excavated in Jericho from 1952-1958. She used improved methods of stratigraphy developed in the late 1940's and early 1950's. She found many details which would seem to conform to the Biblical account of the conquest of Jericho. She believed the city had been sieged. The city was strongly fortified as was Jericho in the Biblical account (Joshua 2:5, 7, 15; 6:5, 20).
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[One] important aspect of Kathleen Kenyon's archaeological career was her role as a teacher. From 1948 to 1962 she lectured in Levantine Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Kenyon's teaching, complemented by her excavations at Jericho and Jerusalem (which successively formed her 'field school'), helped to train a generation of archaeologists, who went on themselves to teach in Britain, Australia, Canada, the United States, Denmark and elsewhere.
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In the 1950’s archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon carried out extensive excavations of Jericho. Her team dug thru layer after layer of ancient cities until they found one layer that had thick walls, had been burned by fire and had huge quantities of food that was undisturbed. The importance of the food that they found is that in the ancient world food was very valuable. All food had to be hand processed and one of the most important things looted from a conquered city would be its food reserves, but not at this layer of Jericho. When God had promised the Israelites success at Jericho, He had made one condition, they were not to take anything from the city for themselves, not even the food. Everything that Kathleen Kenyon had found fit perfectly with the Biblical account, so naturally in her report on the excavation she stated, “The excavation of Jericho, therefore, has thrown no light on the walls of Jericho of which the destruction is so vividly described in the Book of Jericho.” So why did Kenyon ignore the facts in her report?
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When archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon worked at the site of Jericho in the 1950s, she stated that she had not found collapsed walls or anything which proved habitation of Jericho during the time of Joshua. In short, there was no battle for him to fight. There was... an earlier, fortress city that around 1550 BC showed signs of destruction. There were fallen walls and a layer of ash a yard thick, a clear sign of violent destruction by fire. Her interpretation, however, was that this happened before the Israelites captured Jericho. Skeptics appropriated her findings as absolute proof that Joshua and the Battle of Jericho simply did not happen.Bryant G. Wood, archaeologist and editor of “Bible and Spade,” discovered that Kenyon had incorrectly dated her finds.
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Underneath the level of the tower, Kenyon found a sequence of packed floors, on which hunters and gatherers had erected straw huts. Beneath them was the very first structure here: a mud platform with depressions around it (meant perhaps to hold cultic offerings), which she dated to 10,000 years ago.She ... turned up aseries of tools from the earliest level up through the time of the Neolithic town (on display at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem). Studying them, one can trace the transition to agriculture: from the kind of flint that is suited for cutting grain stalks one by one (wild grain) to a sickle-type suited for cutting several together (cultivated). (When and where did people start farming?)
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Both Garstang and Kenyon found many storage jars full of grain that had been caught in the fiery destruction. This is a unique find in the annals of archaeology. Grain was valuable, not only as a source of food, but ... as a commodity which could be bartered. Under normal circumstances, valuables such as grain would have been plundered by the conquerors. Why was the grain left at Jericho? The Bible provides the answer.
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Kathleen Kenyon