WILLIAM DEVER gave a lecture in New Orleans in February which challenged the minimalists.

Scholar: Archaeology rebuffs effort to erase biblical Israel (Baptist Press News)
Mar 2, 2005
By Michael McCormack

NEW ORLEANS (BP)--Revisionist scholars in Europe are ignoring a wealth of archaeological evidence in seeking to discount and, ultimately, erase belief in the biblical Israel, noted archaeologist William Dever said at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

[...]

Though this postmodern movement seeks to sap the Bible of its historical significance and accuracy, Dever maintains that the archaeological evidence supports the biblical accounts of Israel and its kings. His presentation focused on structures he and other archaeologists have uncovered throughout the Holy Land that point to Solomon and the Solomonic Temple. He began with 1 Kings 9:15-16.

[...]

He includes lots of interesting details on the archaeology of Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo. And it seems that Steven Ortiz, of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (and one of Dever's students) is hoping to reopen the Gezer excavation and to carbon date some material from it. The debate goes on ...

UPDATE: This piece is receiving lots of attention on the ANE list. (Start here.) Note in particular the comment of Niels Peter Lemche:

But think of a sentence in the summary of his New Orleans lecture like this: In fact, Dever said, they have recently argued that Hebrew is not a semitic language -- a garbled summary of an argument that biblical Hebrew may be a kind of artificial language, a kind of 'Mandarin' created for the purpose of writing biblical texts (like Qur'an Arabic is a bit different from other written Arabic, and even Homeric Greek different from other written Greek). However, the argument that it is not a semitic language and that the revisionists are claiming that is of course nonsense, and only show that Dever is a least not a properly educated biblical scholar, but exactly a biblical archaeologist. The sentence must be considered an obvious misprission.

My experience is that when the media portray a scholar as saying something strangely garbled, it's almost always the reporter who got it wrong, not the scholar. I would give Dever the benefit of the doubt here. Would he or someone who actually heard the lecture like to comment?