Replies

Dead link, but interesting:

Did Joshua Destroy Canaanite Hatzor?
Bridges for Peace
The discovery of several cuneiform tablets at the 800-dunam (200-acre) site over the years points to the likelihood that Hatzor will produce the first ancient archive, other than the Dead Sea Scrolls, ever to be found in the country. Such an archive would shed light on the Canaanite city which, the Bible tells us, Joshua "burnt with fire" (Joshua 11:11) after its king led a federation of cities that battled against the Israelite incursion. More than that, it would shed light on a historically crucial period we know little about.

Ben-Tor has yet to find the archive, but he appears to be getting closer. Until this year, he hoped there might be two archives - one in each of the two palaces identified on the acropolis atop the tel. The late Prof. Yigael Yadin had been the first to identify a palace during his landmark dig at Hatzor in the 1950s, dating it to the 18th century BC or Middle Bronze (MB) period. That [fit] perfectly with the date of the royal archive in Mari, Syria, in which cuneiform messages relating to MB Hatzor were found - the first hint of a possible archive at Hatzor.

However, when Ben-Tor began his excavations in 1990 he came upon a palace near Yadin's which he dated, by means of its ceramics, to a few hundred years later - that is, to the last half of the second millennium or Late Bronze (LB) period. The generally accepted dating of the biblical destruction of Hatzor by Joshua roughly coincides with the date of this LB palace's destruction, the 14th or 13th centuries BCE. This summer, as he probed the area of the palaces, Ben-Tor began to have an uneasy feeling that Yadin, his former teacher, had made a wrong dating and that there was in fact only one palace - his own LB structure.

Heh heh...