Summer Plans 2018

This summer I’ll have the privilege of participating in archaeological activities for three months in Israel. I’ll be participating in two separate excavations and then I’ll take part in a month of research/research assistanting in Jerusalem. I feel fortunate that the dates for the excavations line up so well with my availability. It’s hard to believe how perfectly the dates of the digs align both with the end of my semester and then the end of the first excavation.

From late May until mid June I will be participating in the Tel Jezreel expedition led by University of Haifa’s Norma Franklin and University of Evansville’s Jennie Ebeling. While most previous expeditions to the site have focused on the upper Tel, this particular project focuses on the lower Tel located next to the site’s water source. It seems then that this part of the site may have existed in order to protect the water source and to limit its use to inhabitants of the upper Tel just one kilometer away. The lower Tel has material from the Neolithic to the Mamluk period but the majority of architecture comes from the Early Bronze Age. The goal of this year’s excavations will then be to further clarify the site’s occupation during the Early Bronze Age. It was this Early Bronze Age material that particularly attracted me to the site since that period is for the moment my primary period of interest.

Tel Yaqush

The second site I’ll be excavating at is Tel Yaqush located in the Jordan valley. The excavations will go from late June until mid-July. This is the pilot season for the dig and I am particularly excited to be working at this site due to its extensive Early Bronze Age sequence and its being run by scholars whose primary focus is the Early Bronze Age. While the site was previously worked at by Uchicago in the 1990’s, excavations haven’t been carried out at the site since 2000. Tel Yaqush itself was a village that was inhabited during the Early Bronze Age I-III (3700-2500 BCE). It was potentially a satellite settlement of the famous EB site of Tel Bet Yerah although this connection requires further study. In addition to gaining a better understanding of village life-ways during the various phases of the Early Bronze Age, the excavation is hoping to study the major social and political changes taking place throughout the EB particularly related to urbanization and migration.

In August I’ll be working at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. While I am not yet entirely clear on what my exact work will be, it will certainly relate to the unpublished material from the 1990’s excavation at Yaqush. During the Uchicago excavations a great deal of material from the site was recovered but never published due to the untimely death of the site’s excavator. Since his death then, the materials have sat at the institute. The effort that I am joining has the goal of eventually publishing these materials in full and augmenting the new generation of research at the site with the previous generation’s.

As I finish writing this the day before heading over to the Jezreel dig, I can say that I’m looking forward to three months of study and new experiences. I anticipate that I’ll advance as an excavator, a scholar, and perhaps most importantly, as a person.