David B. Small

Late Hellenistic Baths in Palestine

This paper focuses on the assertion that Roman baths diffused into late Hellenistic and early Roman period Palestine. Its analysis begins with a division of features of Palestinian baths into builder and user categories. Correlations between these features and the people of ancient Palestine are expressed. In the builder category all the features correlate to building techniques specific to the Near East. In the user category spatial analyses unveil two cultural models of the Palestinian bathing regime. These models are different from those of contemporary Roman/Italian baths and militate against hypotheses of Roman/Italian diffusion. A final note examines the ramifications of this conclusion to the issue of Roman acculturation in Palestine, and its integration into future work on Roman-Palestinian provincial control.

The Archaeology of Israel and Palestine

The geographical scope of this review includes modern Israel, and the lands of the Palestinian authority, including Gaza. The archaeology of each of these current geopolitical areas is so intertwined that we cannot separate one from the other without reducing drastically our understanding of the whole. This overview will address the issues of different periods in the history of this region’s archaeology as well as the character of its archaeology. The scope of this chapter cannot be as complete as a major synthesis of the archaeology of the region. Readers who would wish to read much more comprehensive overviews are strongly encouraged to turn to Ben-Tor’s The Archaeology of Israel (1993), Stern’s massive four volume, The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (1993), or Richards more recent, Near Eastern Archaeology, A Reader (2003).