First Person: Old Sherds, New Science - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 2013

First Person: Old Sherds, New Science

By Hershel Shanks

The Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) has recently published a must-read for dig directors with the imposing and somewhat intimidating title Cyber-Archaeology in the Holy Land—The Future of the Past.a It is written by Tom Levy and his team from the University of California, San Diego,1 who have been excavating at the Edomite copper-mining site in Faynan, Jordan, since 1997.b According to the Bible, the site was visited by the Israelites on their Exodus journey from Egypt (Numbers 33:43). We still dig the old-fashioned way, Levy tells us, “like our 19th-century predecessors with shovels, picks, trowels, dustpans, toothbrushes and so […]

Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Footnotes

1.

Thomas E. Levy, Neil G. Smith, Mohammad Najjar, Thomas A. DeFanti, Falko Kuester and Albert Yu-Min Lin, Cyber-Archaeology in the Holy Land—The Future of the Past (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2012). www.biblicalarchaeology.org/cyber.

2.

See Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, “Edom and Copper,” BAR 32:04; Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, “Condemned to the Mines,” BAR 37:06.

3.

See Yosef Garfinkel, “The Birth and Death of Biblical Minimalism,” BAR 37:03; Philip R. Davies, “What Separates a Minimalist from a Maximalist? Not Much,” BAR 26:02; Hershel Shanks, “Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers,” BAR 23:04.

Endnotes

1.

Actually the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego.

2.

The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).

3.

“Antagonisms in Historical and Radiocarbon Chronology,” in A.J. Shortland and C. Bronk Ramsey, eds., Radiocarbon and the Chronologies of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013), pp. 78–110.