Support. Contrary to Dever, Banning, Holladay, and Kauts note that survey methods are highly developed and are widely accepted tools for the study of regions and settlement patterns within those regions (Banning, “Archaeological Surveys,” 209–22; Holladay, “Method and Theory,” 33–47; Kautz, “Archaeological Surveys,” 209–22). Nelson Glueck, Yohannan Aharoni, Zvi Gal, Moshe Kochavi, Israel Finkelstein, and other researchers have adopted the survey as a basic archaeological research tool. The Archaeological Survey of Israel has been surveying the country consistently since 1965, and the Archaeological Survey Society has established fixed procedures for carrying out scientific surveys. All surveys share the assumption that surface pottery represents archaeological periods buried in the site. Ironically, Dever himself has written that “surface surveys … have been shown to give fairly reliable statistics—especially on period-by-period changes in settlement distribution” (Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 94–95).

Although Dever argues that the presence of any Type A pottery in a site in zone B or C means that it must have been founded in the early 12th century, in doing so he ignores the overlap in pottery sequences. Many scholars have used the methodology of “width stratigraphy” (postulating the movement or spread of populations through the use of pottery-finds) in following population movements (e.g., Kenyon, Gerstenblith, Dothan, Caubet, Stager). In light of this, would seem that the most natural interpretation of the Type A, B, and C cooking pots distribution across zones A, B, and C of the Manassite territory is as a settlement pattern (Hawkins, “The Survey of Manasseh,” 165–79). As Ziony Zevit argues, “This distribution cannot be accounted for if all these settlements were established at the same time, if the pattern of settlement was random, or if it moved … from west to east” (Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 103, n. 35).