Abstract This paper briefly considers some principal difficulties in Ottosson's assessment, for instance the assumption that the archaeological material from ancient Palestine provides us with uninterpreted, contemporary, and objective historical information about the Israelite past. The claim that the archaeological record represents historical sources, and that these will make it possible to distinguish between ideology and historical reality in the Old Testament literature fails to see the limits of archaeology. The author tries to mark out some limits of archaeology with regard to history and biblical literature.