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With archaeology at a standstill in most of the rest of the world, Glueck made good use of the war years. He mapped Transjordan more thoroughly than it had ever been mapped before, listing 1,200 archaeological sites. He completed his survey in 1947, just as strife between Arabs and Jews was becoming so fierce that even the most disarming rabbi could not travel safely in Arab country. Glueck went back to his intermittent professor's job at Hebrew Union College, where he was promptly elected head of the board of governors. He did not resist; H.U.C. is probably the only college in the world that can be governed from the back of a camel 8,000 miles away.
Oldest on Earth. With the war over and the world quieting down, archaeology everywhere made a tremendous spurt forward. Its findings rivaled the great discoveries of the 19th century, when the great names of Sir Flinders Petrie and Heinrich Schliemann were synonymous with the discovery of whole civilizations that had been almost or wholly forgotten. During the iron age of the two World Wars, the "hard" sciences built around physics and electronics had taken the center of the stage. Now there was time and safety for search again. Out of the soil came fertility goddesses, the pinup girls of Neolithic times. With them came sam ples of the earliest-known alphabet. In Galilee the diggers found a mosaic synagogue floor and nearby the inscribed name of Pontius Pilate. At Nemrud Dagh in Turkey they found colossal stone heads of kings, gods and their animal companions.
Some advances were not directly the work of archaeologists. The Dead Sea scrolls were accidental treasure found by curious Arabs poking into Judean caves. Great strides in desert exploration were made possible by the war-derived Jeep, which carries more than a camel, goes faster and farther and consumes even less water. In Palestine the meticulous diggers began their attacks on the great tells. The work is still going on, with new finances and all the newest methods. Instead of burrowing at random or clearing away whole levels by main force, the diggers like to sink small test shafts and dig narrow preliminary trenches. Then they lay out promising areas in checkerboard squares and dig shafts in each square, leaving solid partitions of untouched material in between. Every object found is recorded and photographed. Potsherds are collected as greedily as if they were golden coins. As the shafts go down through thousands of years of occupancy, segments of each ancient wall and floor are left in the partitions where they can be used for continual checking.
University of Pennsylvania Professor James B. Pritchard made spectacular use of this laborious method at a tell just north of Jerusalem. There Pritchard proved that the modern Arab village of El-Jib is Gibeon, the place where Joshua smote the Amorites. Another extraordinary dig was at Jericho north of the Dead Sea, where Oxford's formidable Kathleen Kenyon used the latest methods on a tell that had been inhabited for 5,500 years before Joshua blew the trumpets that made its walls fall down.
Down went Miss Kenyon too, to the bottom of the tell where she found a Neolithic town with regular buildings and defensive walls which carbon 14 proved to have been built in