Petrie Cuts Into Tell El Hesi and Gives Excavation a Timeline

Biblical archaeology excavates and interprets sites connected to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, reading a site's physical strata against the text rather than assuming a layer confirms an episode because the text names the place. The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie made the field's founding methodological breakthrough in 1890, when he cut a stratigraphic trench into Tell el Hesi in southern Palestine and used the pottery recovered from each successive layer to establish a relative chronology, a technique that let excavators date a layer by what was buried in it rather than by which biblical event they expected to find there.

Petrie's stratigraphic method is what separates biblical archaeology from simply treating an excavated find as automatic proof of a scriptural claim: a destruction layer, a fortification wall or a cultic object can be dated and described on its own physical evidence, then compared against the biblical account rather than read through it. The atlas relies on this distinction wherever an archaeological claim touches a biblical narrative, reporting what the stratigraphy itself establishes and being explicit about the separate question of whether it matches, is silent on, or conflicts with the text.