A methodological tradition that uses ancient long-form religious and cosmological textual corpora — particularly the Hebrew Bible in the Levantine field and the Vedic and Puranic corpus in the South Asian field — as a structured source of hypotheses for landscape archaeology. Both lineages are roughly a century old in their modern form. The Levantine line grew out of Albright and the early-20th-century Israel Exploration Society tradition; the South Asian line out of the Archaeological Survey of India's mid-century excavations and the satellite-era Sarasvati paleochannel research that followed. The methodological move is not devotional. The corpora are treated as long-form records of scale, geography, ritual architecture, calendar, and population movement; what they claim is held as testable against the ground.
Sections
What the corpora contribute
Both the Hebrew Bible and the Vedic-Puranic corpus are structured records that talk at length about quantitative and spatial categories which other ancient documents touch on only obliquely. The categories below name th…
Read →Methodological cadence
The published cadence is *"the text says X; the imagery, survey, and excavation at site Y show Z."* Hypotheses come from the corpus; conclusions come from the ground. Belief is not a prerequisite for the corpus to be us…
Read →Landmark applications
Cases where a textual claim drove material findings that other excavators could test independently. Each of these is contested in its own way; what unites them is that they began with a textual hypothesis and produced d…
Read →Named practitioners
Established figures in the textual-hypothesis lineage. Affiliations link to the institutional homepage.
Read →Where the field is concentrated
The discipline lives in a relatively small set of academic institutions, learned societies, and journals — most of which carry one or both of the two lineages.
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