Macalister Robert Alexander Stewart. The excavation of Gezer: 1902 - 1905 and 1907 - 1909: Volume II

J. Murray, 1912. — 502 p.In what form the results of the Excavation of Gezer should be finally
presented is a question that has cost me much careful thought. Two
alternatives offered themselves, between which it was difficult to choose.
My preference at first was to follow the natural division of the remains into
epochs and culture levels, and to give a bird's-eye view of the city's life,
so far as 'excavation could reveal it, at each successive stage of the city's
history. Indeed, I made some progress with the writing of the Memoir on
such a plan; but I found before long that it' was not free from serious
in~onvenience. The complexity of the stratification of the mound itself made
it difficult to carry through the work of description in the form proposed.
Certain classes of antiquities (such as bronze arrowheads) persist with but
little chan-ge over extended periods of time; so that it would not be easy
to avoid repetition, or else an undue expansion of the earlier chapters, with
many cumbrous cross-references in the later. Inevitable also would be a
dissection of the history of other classes of objects, notably of pottery, into
a large number of isolated parts, which the student would afterwards be
obliged to reunite for himself. After giving a fair trial to th'is method of
setting forth the results, I decided to abandon it in favour of the other,
which consists in grouping associated types of objects together, tracing the
history of each independently of the rest.