Itzhaq Shai

• PhD
• Dean for Research and Development at Ariel University

Soils and sediments are valuable historical archives that enable the investigation of ancient anthropogenic and natural processes. This study demonstrates that not all human activity markers are visible. Nevertheless, a combination of physical and chemical methods, including portable optically stimulated luminescence (pOSL) and portable X-ray fluor...

This article examines the approach of Ernest Tatham Richmond, director of the Department of Antiquities of the British Mandate government in Palestine from 1927 to 1937, toward the archaeological research of members of the Jewish Yishuv. The initial years of the Mandate reflected a supportive approach toward the Jewish Yishuv, and under the Departm...

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The 2024 call for the fourth round of the Koschitzky Prize for young scholars

This study investigates the effects that an encounter with a foreign object can have on local traditions. Notions of object agency and object biographies will be utilized to address what happens when people become entangled with new things: the new context can have an impact on the newly introduced object, and those newly introduced objects can sim...

In ancient Near Eastern iconography, panthers and lions were frequently used to express social status. The zooarchaeological remains of panthers and lions found in this region, however, are most commonly interpreted only as evidence for the management of dangerous animals. Starting with the faunal material from Iron Age Tel Burna, the authors colla...

In this article, we examine the growing importance of Jewish archeology for the Jewish population of Palestine/EI under the British Mandate by considering the impact of three formative archaeological excavations. The Tiberias hot springs excavation (1920–1921) was the first in the country to be carried out by a Jewish research institution, a Jewish...

The Heritage Center for the Study of The Kingdom of Israel at Ariel University is happy to announce the call for the 2023 Koschitzky Prize for papers by young scholars. Up to three prizes will be awarded: a first prize of $1000, a second prize of $750 a third prize of $500 The prizes will be awarded for the best-published articles, MA theses or PhD...

This article examines the trends in archaeological research and the state of conservation of archaeological sites in Judea and Samaria between 1993 and 2022. The absence of Palestinian-Israeli cooperation resulted in the establishment of two parallel bodies that have been responsible for the issue, with no connection between them. In the Israeli-co...

Major geopolitical and social changes took place in the Southern Levant during the Iron II including the establishment of territorial states, and subsequently, the intervention of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires in local economies. These geopolitical shifts affected local economic and agricultural practices, along with other aspects of daily li...

Techno-stylistic studies in ceramic analysis have largely focused on characterising production groups, based on the similarity of various objects and how they were made. The demographics of potters and the division of labour often remain enigmatic in current chaîne opératoire research. A growing number of biometric studies have demonstrated the pot...

Tel Burna’s prominent summit, encompassed by a 70 × 70 m casemate fortification, has attracted attention since at least the nineteenth century CE. An analysis of the archaeological data collected during ongoing excavations at the tell indicates that these fortifications were built in the late tenth or early ninth century BCE. The fortification of t...

This paper discusses a krater recently discovered in a cultic building at Tel Burna in the Shephelah. Of special interest is the krater’s relatively well-preserved decoration containing multiple nature scenes related to the so-called tree of life or sacred tree motif. The krater’s physical description and archaeological context and the decoration’s...

The Heritage Center for the Study of The Kingdom of Israel at Ariel University is happy to announce the call for the 2022 Koschitzky Prize for papers by young scholars. Up to three prizes will be awarded: • a first prize of $1000, • a second prize of $750 • a third prize of $500 The prizes will be awarded for the best published articles, MA these...

In addition to his stellar scientific career, Prof. Yuval Ne'eman devoted a number of his years to public service. At the beginning of the 1980s, Ne'eman joined the political arena, through which he sought to actualize his ideological beliefs. In this capacity, he helped bring about the establishment of dozens of Jewish settlements in Juda and Sama...

Moshe Dayan remains a popular personality who devoted most of his life to the Israeli state and whose military contributions have overshadowed his illegal activities in the field of archaeology. This article offers the first examination of Dayan’s impact on archaeology in the West Bank during his tenure as Israel’s defence minister (1967–74). Dayan...

Discussions on daily life in Early Bronze Age society in the southern Levant often focus on subsistence or ritual phenomena, while aspects relating to entertainment and leisure are rarely discussed. This paper presents evidence for gaming behaviour, in the form of game boards and game pieces, that were recovered in the excavations of the Early Bron...

Tel Burna—widely identified as biblical Libnah—and Khirbet el-‘Atar, c. 2 km north, occupy both sides of Naḥal Guvrin in the western Shephelah. At Tel Burna, excavations have revealed a prominent casemate fortification wall that encloses the site’s summit and is confidently dated to the Iron Age II. It was established at the early stages of the Iro...

Linum usitatissimum L. was, and still is, cultivated for either flax fibres or for oil-rich linseeds. Depending on their intended purpose, flax plants differ in height, branching and quantity of capsules. Likewise, the linseeds themselves vary in size: linseeds for oil production are larger and heavier than those for flax plants purposed for fibres...

This article examines the factors that influenced the trends in archaeological excavations in Judea and Samaria during the decade attending the 1967 Six-Day War. Examination reveals a close connection between the political trends in Israel as they pertained to Judea and Samaria and the archaeological excavations undertaken in this region. When a pr...

The outcome of the 1948 war in Palestine resulted not only in the country’s partition between the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan, but also in the division of its archaeological research. The Jordanian Department of Antiquities, which was responsible for administering archaeological research in the West Bank until 1967, prioritized resear...

Several methods have been applied to understand the typologies, functions and provenances of stone tools in Ancient Near East, but the digital network analysis between stones, artefacts and spaces is still uncommon. Network analysis which has been conducting in the archaeological field is a potential method and mainly applies to understand the dist...

In 2010–2019, excavations were conducted at Tel Burna (Permit No. A-7432; License Nos. G-58/2010, G-21/2011, G-14/2012, G-36/2013, G-12/2014, G-53/2016, G-42/2017, G-43/2018, G-47/2019; map ref. 18805/61532; Fig. 1), following a survey season in 2009. The first five excavation seasons were on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology at Bar-Ilan Unive...

An ancient tell is a multi-period archaeological site, where anthropogenic, and natural sedimentation processes took place. Although a tell is primarily an anthropogenic type of geomorphological feature, it is affected by natural processes as well. This contribution discusses how these processes can be determined within the context of archaeologica...

Site formation processes at ancient tells in the southern Levant have been the focus of several micromorphological studies, contributing to the differentiation of anthropogenic remains from long-term natural sedimentation, occurring post-abandonment. This paper discusses how the study of sedimentary processes and chemical compositions of sediments...

The outcome of the 1948 war in Palestine resulted not only in the country’s partition between the state of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan but also in the division of its archaeological research. The Jordanian Department of Antiquities, which was responsible for administering archaeological research in the West Bank until 1967, prioritized researc...

Tel Burna is a multi-period site located in the Shephelah. The Late Bronze Age was one of the two main periods during which the site was inhabited. In this paper, we will present the various finds dating to this period, focusing on the public building that was discovered on its western side. The building and the finds provide a window into the cult...

In the summer of 2015, the Tel Burna Excavation Project in Israel opened Area C, with the goal of better understanding the adjacent agricultural areas. During the 2015 and 2016 seasons, installations of various sizes and shapes were found carved out of the limestone bedrock. Although some Byzantine and Persian occupation is known at the site, surve...

Votive objects are a common part of cult and ritual throughout the world. In this study, we present and discuss two miniature votive vessels and other related ritual deposits from a Late Bronze cultic enclosure at Tel Burna, Israel. We conclude that the Cypriot character of many of the finds (including one of the two votive objects) might indicate...

A broad range of novel topics dealing with archaeological finds, environmental impacts of human activity, life science methods and environmental changes are presented in the given special issue. This issue was initiated and is based on an international workshop which took place at Ariel University in 2017 entitled “Archaeology, Science and Environm...

In this paper, we describe the results of our recent excavations of the later EB III occupation at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath. The research has demonstrated that Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath is a large (ca. 24 ha) and significant regional center, surrounded by a thick and extensive fortification system with a high stone foundation and mud-brick superstructure. Systema...

This article presents an overview of the past ten years of research at Tel Burna (in Hebrew)

Bronze Age trade in the Eastern Mediterranean is well attested in south Levantine archaeological research, with imported vessels generally playing a significant role in the ceramic assemblage. While the majority of these vessels are found repeatedly at many different sites, there are cases where a rare find sheds new light on the way in which trade...

The research discusses the administration and centralization of the Kingdom of Judah, which has been the focus of many studies for decades. Here we reassess these issues based on the archaeological finds alongside historical and biblical studies. These lead us to suggest that, at first, the administration in Judah was based on local elites that pla...

The origin of domestic donkeys (Equus asinus dom.) appears to lie in northeastern Africa, somewhere in the region of Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. They were domesticated from the Nubian ass (Equus asinus fer.) sometime early in fourth millennium b.c.e., or around the end of the Chalcolithic (Kimura et al. 2010; Milevski 2009: 251; Rossel et al. 200...

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Analysis of a sacrificed and interred domestic donkey from an Early Bronze Age (EB) IIIB (c. 2800–2600 BCE) domestic residential neighborhood at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel, indicate the presence of bit wear on the Lower Premolar 2 (LPM2). This is the earliest evidence for the use of a bit among early domestic equids, and in particular donkeys, in th...

In this paper, we propose an alternative analytical method for identifying vessel shaping techniques at the mesoscopic scale to complement current micro and macro methods in ceramic analysis. We demonstrate how this simple and low cost method permits clear and rapid identification of the signatures indicative of different pottery shaping techniques...

It is often assumed that domestic animals in early urban Near Eastern centres either are a reflection of the local pastoral economy, or were raised at a distance by pastoral specialists. In this paper, we test these assumptions through detailed isotopic analyses (carbon, oxygen and strontium) of caprines (sheep and goat) from Tell es-Safi/Gath, an...

This paper discusses the results of the use of PlanGrid as a test case for its adaptation as an archaeological data collection tool for the Tel Burna archaeological project. PlanGrid was designed as an iPad app for construction workers to have cloud-based access to blueprint drawings that multiple users could simultaneously access and heavily annot...

The story of Canaanite Gath begins with the el-Amarna texts (Na'aman 1979; Rainey 2012; Levin, this issue), where it appears that the city was a major contender in the Shephelah power plays of the fourteenth century B.C.E. While some have contended the connection between Gath, Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi and the Amarna period ruler Šuwardatu (Moran 1992: 384), th...

In 1899, Bliss and Macalister launched a brief but intensive campaign of excavation at the site of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath and uncovered evidence for a large-scale fortification system and thick deposits from various time periods. While they argued that the majority of remains, including the fortifications, were of Iron Age or later origin, some Early Br...

The Shephelah, known as the breadbasket of the southern Levant, is one of the more extensively investigated regions of the southern Levant in terms of archaeobotanical research. However, studies dealing with agriculture are scarce in comparison to the archaeobotanical data available. The analysis of the archaeobotanical assemblage in combination wi...

Human settlement activities have caused changes in soil chemical properties that might remain preserved in the soil archive for a very long time. These traces might be close to irreversible on the timescale of known civilizations. Our study explores the potential of an extensive mapping of the multi-elemental composition of soil and buried sediment...

This report presents the past four years of our adaptation and implementation of the construction program PlanGrid as a digital field registration system at the Tel Burna Archaeological Project (Israel). In this report, we will discuss the following: (1) the benefits of using PlanGrid with tablets and smartphones; (2) details related to our specifi...

Human settlement activities are connected with the accumulation of nutrients in archaeological soils. We address the question of whether the large-scale mapping of the elemental composition of the topsoil in contemporary rangeland can be used for the detection of ancient settlement activities. Using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), we mapped th...

This book honors the memory of Brian Hesse, a scholar of Near Eastern archaeology, a writer of alliterative and punned publication titles, and an accomplished amateur photographer. Hesse specialized in zooarchaeology, but he influenced a wider range of excavators and ancient historians with his broad interpretive reach. He spent much of his career...

Pebble stone installations are commonly found at various Early Bronze Age sites in the southern Levant. However, their function is often assumed or unknown. Thirteen circular pebble installations were found scattered throughout a residential neighbourhood dating to the Early Bronze Age III at Tell es-Safi/Gath. Five such installations were recently...

Amon the son of Manasseh ruled over Judah for a short period of two years in the mid-7th century BCE. In the book of Kings, only eight verses describe his reign (2 Kgs 21: 19-26), and the Deuteronomist evaluated him as an evil king who was later assassinated for his sins. The following paper will focus on the unusual name of this king. Amon is a n...

Ongoing excavations at the Early Bronze Age III settlement of Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel have recovered a small assemblage of basalt ground stone objects in a residential neighbourhood. As high quality basalt is not found within the Shephelah (the Judean foothills), the occurrence of basalt artefacts at settlements in this region has frequently been...

In this study we reassess the character of the Judahite Kingdom during the Iron Age. As opposed to most past discussions of this monarchy, which define it as a highly centralized political structure, we suggest to identify various facets indicating that local elites played a major role in the societal and leadership structure of the Judahite Kingdo...

Horvat Lavnin (Khirbet Tell el-Beida) is a multi-period site located in the Judean Shephelah ca. 5 km south of the Elah Valley. The upper part of the site is mound-shaped and enclosed by a wall that is clearly visible on the surface. Four burial caves on the slopes of the site were looted in the 1990s. Despite the damage caused, the shape of the bu...

Isotope data from a sacrificial ass and several ovicaprines (sheep/goat) from Early Bronze Age household deposits at Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel provide direct evidence for the movement of domestic draught/draft and husbandry animals between Old Kingdom Egypt (during the time of the Pyramids) and Early Bronze Age III Canaan (ca. 2900–2500 BCE). Vacil...

Phases of the Early Bronze Age in Israel. (DOCX)

87Sr/86Sr ratios for ovicaprines. (DOCX)

Contextual and excavation data of sacrificial ass (Equus asinus) and ovicaprines. (DOCX)

Carbon and oxygen isotope values for sacrificial ass (Equus asinus). (DOCX)

Carbon and oxygen isotope values for ovicaprines. (DOCX)

Bivariate plots of individual ovicaprines (digits 1–5, blue dots) and sacrificed ass (M1-M3, red dots) tooth enamel δ13C values against δ18O values (a), and 87Sr/86Sr ratios (b). Error bars represent ±1σ. (EPS)

Local baseline modern plants. (DOCX)

87Sr/86Sr for the sacrificial ass (Equus asinus). (DOCX)

With the emergence of urban culture in the southern Levant in the Early Bronze Age, new types of pottery and ceramic techniques appeared, among them pottery (usually combed) coated with a white material. A selection of sherds from Early Bronze strata was studied in an attempt to analyze this material. Using microscopy and various other methods, the...

In this paper, we review the evidence for the use of the domestic donkey as a mode of transportation in the Early Bronze Age. The study will present the domestic donkey remains (artefactual and zoological) and their archaeological context from the Early Bronze Age III domestic neighborhood at Tell es-Safi/Gath. The remains indicate the significant...

This paper describes some of the results of the excavations of the Early Bronze Age III non-elite neighbourhood in Area E of Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel. The neighbourhood contained a layout that is found at other EB urban centres, including sturdy small multi-room houses, often with a courtyard and in few cases a small storage room. Occupants had ac...

Since its start in 2009, the Tel Burna Archaeological Project has had an open-door policy, allowing for anyone of any age to volunteer, with no applied time limit. This inclusive policy has exposed many different types of people to various aspects of archaeological fieldwork and research. The openness of the project is integral to the project's phi...

Recent archaeological excavations at the early urban settlement of Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel present the opportunity to reconstruct the life-history of basalt ground stone artefacts of an early urban domestic neighbourhood. Tell es-Safi/Gath is a multi-period site located on the border between the Judean foothills and the southern coastal plain of...

Tell es-Safi/Gath is a multi-period site located on the border between the Judean foothills (Shephelah) and the southern coastal plain in central Israel, which has been subject to survey and excavations over the last two decades. Excavations by Bliss and Macalister in 1899 exposed a fortification system which was dated to the “Jewish period”. In th...

The discovery of a plaque associated to the New Kingdom at Tel Burna in the southern Levant augments archaeological evidence to enhance historical understanding of the Late Bronze Age occupation at the site.

Excavations at Tel Burna, Israel, have uncovered portions of a large structure from the Late Bronze Age IIB, yielding numerous nds that suggest ritual and cultic practices occurred in the building, particularly in its central courtyard. is article presents the nds from the excavations, examining the meaning of the cultic artifacts discovered and...