ABSTRACT
It appears that until the 1960s, the identification of the settlers of the highland villages as Israelites was quite straightforward. The highland 'archaeological culture', in the spirit of the Culture History school, was simply viewed as Israelite. This culture was differentiated from the Philistine of the southern coastal plain and the Canaanite of the northern valleys (e.g. Dever 1998: 47-48). The first trigger behind the questioning of the Israelite label on the settlers of the highland Iron I sites was our awareness of other groups, such as the Hivites, Kenites, etc., who were active at the time but not identified archaeologically (see, e.g., B. Mazar 1981; Finkelstein 1988: 28; London 1989: 50; Skjeggestand 1992: 165, 176, 177, 185; Finkelstein and Na'aman 1994: 16-17; Stager 1998: 136-37; note, however, that only a few of the above have used this to cast doubt on the identification of the highland settlers).
