Ken Dark's "Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth"

Ken Dark is an archaeologist and historian principally researching the 1st millennium AD in Europe and the Middle East, and the relevance of the past to contemporary societies. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught at Oxford, Cambridge and Reading Universities before moving to King's College London. He has also been a visiting Professor at the University of Navarra. He is the author of over 100 academic publications, has directed many excavations and surveys, and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Royal Historical Society, and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Dark applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth, and reported the following:

Most of this page outlines the career of the American scholar, Dr Eugenia Nitowski (1949-2007), at various times in her varied career a student of healthcare, African ‘bush pilot’, a Carmelite nun, and – importantly for this book – a ‘biblical archaeologist’. Nitowski is relevant to the archaeology of Nazareth as the only person prior to the author to propose a programme of fieldwork on the crucial site of the Sisters of Nazareth convent subsequent to the (literally) ground-breaking excavation by the convent's nuns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the important subsequent studies by Henri Senès, a Jesuit priest, in the mid-twentieth century. Nitowski’s proposed study of the site was never realised, and was misguided in its methodology, but is significant for the history of the archaeological study of the Sisters of Nazareth site.

Looking at page 99 alone would give a misleading impression of the book as a whole.

Page 99 is part of a three-chapter history of the archaeological excavation and survey of the Sisters of Nazareth site, including an account of my own work at that site between 2006-2010. Using up to date 21st-century archaeological methods, this enabled me to disentangle more than century of discoveries at the convent, revealing a long sequence of structures from a first-century house to what may be the city's Byzantine cathedral and a Crusader pilgrimage church. The sequence is of importance for the archaeological study of Nazareth and more broadly for a wide range of themes in the archaeology of the Roman, Byzantine and Crusader periods.

Learn more about Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue