Archaeology is something most people think of as either Indiana Jones-like adventuring for strange artifacts in exotic settings, or as the realm of technicians using state-of-the-art equipment to almost magically analyze or date artifacts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Shroud of Turin in scientific laboratories.
The reality, of course, is usually at neither of those extremes, and many people would be surprised to learn how archaeologists must often cope with very limited data or techniques that are far from perfect. An example is carbon-14 dating which most people presume can be applied to anything made from organic material to find its age. The reality here is that carbon-14 dating is actually hampered by the fact that for the period of approximately 800-400 BC it is affected by a calibration issue (called the Hallstatt plateau) which means that material from that period cannot be dated with any certainty.
This problem is particularly significant for biblical studies, as the period 800-400 BC is a vitally important one in Near Eastern history – a period in which many important biblical events such as the destruction of Jerusalem and other Judean cities occurred. But now the application of another dating method – that of archaeomagnetism – shows great promise for biblical archaeology in general and this period of biblical history in particular. The method works on things such as pottery sherds, bricks, roof tiles and ovens (which are found on most archaeological habitation sites) that record the Earth’s magnetic field as they are burned at high temperatures. Because the direction of earth’s magnetic field has changed over history – and the dates of the changing directions can be calculated – we can look at the magnetic field “fixed” in a burnt object and tell when it was burned. This is particularly useful in situations where biblical cities were affected by Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns that left behind destruction layers.
The archaeomagnetic dating technique has actually been used by archaeologists for several decades, but is only now being used with success on archaeological sites of biblical significance. Recently, archaeologists working in Israel reconstructed the magnetic field recorded in twenty burnt destruction layers at seventeen archaeological sites. The study included the analysis of over a thousand specimens from some 144 samples, and the recovered data meshes well with what historical anchors we have for the time period.
As the Times of Israel reported: “The method utilizes excavation layers that have already been reliably dated to create baseline anchors for the archaeomagnetic data, which can then be applied to other sites that until now had been impossible to confidently date. The more anchors are created, the researchers say, the more finely calibrated the dating method will become” (25 October 2022).
This means that archaeologists working on biblically significant sites will now be able to date objects and whole archaeological layers that were previously difficult or impossible to date with accuracy – especially in the problematic period of 800-400 BC. So archaeomagnetic dating is now being used as a complementary dating tool that promises to further improve our understanding of the archaeology of biblical times – and ultimately, of the Bible itself.
