By the 1950s, Albright and his students, notably Nelson Glueck, E. A. Speiser, G. Ernest Wright, and Cyrus Gordon, claimed to have found physical evidence for the historical events behind many Old Testament narratives.
The research these institutions sponsored, at least in these early days, was primarily geographic, and it was not until the 1890s that Sir Flinders Petrie introduced the basic principles of scientific excavation, including stratigraphy and ceramic typology to Palestinian archaeology.
This explained the Old Testament as the composite product of authors working between the 10th and 5th centuries BC, and raised the question of whether one could regard the books of the bible as a reliable source of information for Solomon's period or earlier.
By the middle of the 20th century the work of Albright and his students, notably Nelson Glueck (1900–1971), E. A. Speiser (1902–1965), G. Ernest Wright (1909–1974) and Cyrus Gordon (1908–2001), had produced a consensus that biblical archaeology had provided physical evidence for the originating historical events behind the Old Testament narratives: in the words of Albright: "Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history.
[12] Bright did not believe that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph could be regarded as reliable history, or that it was possible to reconstruct the origins of Israel from the biblical text alone, but he did believe that the stories in Genesis reflected the physical reality of the 20th to 17th centuries BC, and that it was therefore possible to write a history of the origins of Israel by comparing the biblical accounts with what was known of the time from other sources.
[17] Dever was broadly successful: most archaeologists working in the world of the Bible today do so within a processual or post-processual framework: yet few describe themselves in these terms.
Evangelical scholar Kenneth Kitchen, despite supporting the historicity of the Bible, has also been critical of biblical archaeology as it was conceived in the first half of the 20th century.