Earliest Israel remains terra incognita, literally and from the ground down. The Merneptah Stela Stanza VIII proclaiming Egyptian suzerainty in the southern Levant documents Israel as a noteworthy foreign enemy by the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E. (1) Except for this mention, neither contemporary epigraphic nor archaeological evidence explicitly points to a late-thirteenth-century B.C.E. "Israel." However, conservatively dated biblical and archaeological evidence has been invoked to attest to Israel in the twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C.E. Frank Cross and Tryggve Mettinger, among others, date the Bible's earliest testimonials, the Song of the Sea (Exod 15) and Song of Deborah (Judg 5) to the late twelfth or early eleventh century B.C.E. (2) Ironically, it was Israel Finkelstein, now leading a revisionist contingent, who claimed to validate the early dates with archaeological evidence. In his central highlands survey, Finkelstein identified as "Israelite" the hundreds of hamlets and farmsteads founded in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.E. (3) Although the Iron I material culture, cultic practices, burial customs, and architecture continued Late Bronze Age "Canaanite" traditions, the founding population was readily identified as Merneptah's "Israel" and biblical "Israel." (4) Nearly two decades later, not a single feature of those settlements may be conclusively identified as exclusively "Israelite." Aside from the founding of new settlements in territory allegedly settled by Israel, nothing decisively links the new settlements to Merneptah's Israel or biblical Israel. In view of this impasse, this article pursues an alternate route in search of ethnic Israel of the premonarchic period. After demonstrating the limitations of the Culture Area approach to ethnicity currently employed by most archaeologists, I will present the Meaningful Boundaries approach, stemming from Fredrik Barth's work. This model will, in turn, be expanded to incorporate Jonathan Hall and Stephen Cornell's work on a group's crafting of its history as a process that fosters ethnic identity. Based on the new model that weds archaeology and text, the Tell-Tale approach, datable archaeological features with biblically attested significance will be proposed to indicate the crafting of Israel's history from as early as the twelfth to eleventh century B.C.E.
