Shifting Sand is the journal of Julian Berry, then a 17-year-old archaeologist, written on-site during excavations in Deir Alla, Jordan in 1964. The dig was organized by the University of Leiden and led by Dr Henk Franken who was looking to find a material context for Old Testament narratives, and to build a stratigraphic chronology to mark the transition from the Bronze through to the early Iron Ages based mainly around pottery finds. When the author was working on the site, three clay tablets were discovered from the late Bronze Age with early Canaanite inscriptions that when translated in...