Through the generosity of donors, BAR has supported numerous excavations over the years. Read more about our efforts to preserve and restore excavated sites in “BAR’s Crusades”.
Achziv
Eilat Mazar’s excavation of the cemeteries at this Phoenician site on the Mediterranean coast revealed, among other things, ceremonial scepters from an eighth-century B.C. tomb.
Arad
Ruth Amiran and her colleagues excavated a mysterious shaft outside the Arad fortress and ultimately identified it as a well that had provided water to the Israelite settlement in the ninth–sixth centuries B.C. and again in the Herodian period.
Cave of Letters
Richard Freund and Rami Arav returned to this famous hideout from the second-century A.D. Bar-Kokhba Revolt (which had been previously excavated by Yohanan Aharoni and Yigael Yadin) and revealed additional finds, including coins, pottery and human remains that indicated habitation in the first century A.D. as well—perhaps by Jewish priests fleeing the Romans with Jerusalem’s cultic objects.
Gezer
Ronny Reich used ground-penetrating radar and excavation techniques in an attempt to locate the elusive source of the Gezer water system.
Hippos/Sussita
Inspired by a BAR article about this city of the Decapolis located on a dramatic height above the Sea of Galilee, Arthur Segal and Michael Eisenberg undertook its first professional excavation. Established by Greeks, inhabited by Jews, Christians and then Arabs, it was finally destroyed in an eighth-century A.D. earthquake.
Hyrcania
Oren Gutfeld continued the excavation that Scroll scholar John Allegro had begun decades before of the mysterious tunnels that burrow beneath the ruins of Hyrcania in the Judean Desert. The site may be one of the locations mentioned in the Copper Scroll as containing buried treasure, but so far no hidden treasure has been found.
Megiddo
Because the dumps from earlier excavations sometimes prove to be rich with small finds, David Ussishkin and Israel Finkelstein stratigraphically excavated one of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute’s dumps from the excavations in the 1920s and 1930s.
Qumran
Magen Broshi, Hanan Eshel and Robert Eisenman explored additional caves near Qumran and excavated portions of the cemetery associated with the site.
Tell es-Safi/Gath
Aren Maeir directs the ongoing excavations at this site identified as Gath, city of the Philistine Pentapolis and hometown of Goliath, according to the Bible. In addition to numerous other finds and stunning pottery, Tell es-Safi has produced a fascinating ostracon and ceramic situlae that have interesting implications for Biblical interpretation.
Temple Mount Sifting
Following the illegal excavation and construction by the Muslim authority on the Temple Mount, Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig are sifting through tons of archaeologically rich soil that were dumped into the Kidron Valley. Their project has produced numerous extraordinary artifacts from the First and Second Temple periods, about which they will report to BAR readers in an upcoming article.
