James Riley Strange, Excavating the Land of Jesus: How Archaeologists Study the People of the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 52-53.
[I]f the goal is to recover objects for display, then method is gratuitous. One can simply dig holes or, better yet, visit an antiquities dealer and let someone else get dirty. If one wishes to understand ancient human beings by means of their technologies, societies, and values, one must begin with data, and one must collect those data following a meticulous method. Without a method, archaeologists would end up with objects but no context to help understand them. For the CSI franchise, the counterpart would be to present a slug from the same kind of gun used in a crime and when asked: “Where did this come from?” to answer: “What does it matter? It’s from a .44, the caliber the shooter used.” Without a context, an object is not evidence.
The Amateur Exegete 
Along related lines, the Mt. Ebal “curse tablet” the Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) folks sifted from a debris pile and over-hyped is in the news again. Christopher Rollston, Aren Maier, Amihai Mazar, and Naama Yahalom-Mack have just published three papers documenting and exploring many of the big concerns and questions that immediately started swirling when Team ABR’s peculiar article appeared last May.
(Such as why the route of the purported letters resembled one of those old Family Circus comics that traced the kids’ looping, swerving, erratic meanderings throughout the neighborhood, the mall, the carnival, wherever. Initially I had no problem giving Stripling and Galil the provisional benefit of the doubt, but the total lack of anything resembling rational linearity in the “inscription” was a deal-breaker.)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-academic-articles-heap-fresh-doubt-on-mount-ebal-curse-tablet-interpretation/
-Lex Lata
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