[This quick bit of info here, is very important. A guy I know who was a lecturer in scientific method talks extremely highly of Thompson. It is interesting that as late as the 1970s, that the Bible was presumed to be real history and that all archaeology was presumed should be fitted into it. Thompson changed that. The resultant findings have huge implications. It's sort of like The Great Jewish Masque. I will return to this later. But here is a very short writeup someone did about Thompson. Interesting he is Danish and was originally a Roman Catholic. Jan]

In the 1970s Thompson, amongst others, began a sea-change in the study of Syro-Palestinian history, at that time known as "Biblical archaeology". Until that time, the endeavours of archaeologists were entirely devoted to demonstrating the accuracy of the Old Testament (OT) accounts of the history of the Hebrews.

The foundational assumption was that the OT was a reliable account of the events it related, and that the job of archaeologists was to make the evidence they dug from the ground fit the Bible’s history.

Thompson was one of the first to challenge that assumption. In the decades since, Thompson has been more than vindicated, and his views paved the way for a complete re-evaluation of Hebrew history, independent of the stories in the Bible