From the Editors

New details on the development of a significant multiperiod site in Israel and an innovative approach to interpreting Egyptian iconography are discussed in the articles in this volume of the journal. In addition, this issue contains both a Forum and a Response to a previous Forum, both on timely and important topics in archaeology today.In their article on Avdat (Oboda) authors Ofer Sion, Eli Ashkenazi, and Tali Erickson-Gini explore this site in the Negev Highlands during the Byzantine period based on their very comprehensive survey. Detailing the results of research on over five hundred sites within the survey area from the middle and late Byzantine era (450–650 CE), the authors describe a multilayered picture of Avdat, its hundreds of man-made caves and its surrounding hinterlands during this period.The famed Sycomore Goddess of ancient Egypt is the subject of Shirly Ben-Dor Evian and Eshchar Gichon’s article on “Materiality and Animism as Agents of Iconographic Change.” The authors observe an increasingly anthropomorphic representation of the goddess on Egyptian coffins in the course of the second and first millennia BCE and offer an explanation based upon the media and materials used to create them.Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis’s response to our Forum on “Decolonizing Archaeology,” in which their book Archaeology, Nation, and Race was reviewed by several scholars in the field (volume 12, number 1), comes at a time in which as they write, “many of the phenomena we were talking about [have] gained such a depressingly palpable topicality.” Their response addresses both the matters brought up by the reviewers in the Forum and reflects on the tragic events that occurred in the Levant only two years after the publication of their book. It is a timely as well as thought-provoking dialogue.The mainstay of archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean is the accurate dating of sites and the interpretation of those dates. In this Forum section, Lyndelle C. Webster, Samuel R. Wolff, and Steven M. Ortiz discuss the implications of new radiocarbon dating from Late Bronze to Iron Age Gezer in Israel. Responses to the introduction of this material and the authors’ conclusions on its repercussions include contributions by Shirly Ben-Dor Evian, Erez Ben-Yosef, William G. Dever, Israel Finkelstein and Eli Piasetzky, Yosef Garfinkel, Thomas E. Levy, Aren M. Maeir, and Amihai Mazar. It is a lively and highly informative debate among the most acknowledged experts on one of the more important chronological issues in biblical archaeology.The Book Reviews section highlights volumes on eastern Mediterranean amphorae and on innovative approaches to recording, preserving, and studying cultural heritage in a divided Cyprus.