Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
If we conduct today a survey of early scientific studies on the archaeology of the Near East, most of them seem to be only of historic interest. Only a few of the results published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century remain valid. Nevertheless the first three decades of the twentieth century were a very important period for setting the agenda in methods and aims of Near Eastern archaeology. Moreover, many of these early theories and propositions still have an effect on current research, even when in the present state of knowledge they are out of date or no longer of relevance.