From the Director

July 15, 1996

Greetings From the Negev Desert in Israel and our UCSD on-line excavation project. I am pleased to welcome you to our latest Web page designed specifically to give you an up-date on some of our lastest discoveries from our Nahal Tillah project here in Israel.... while we are digging in the field. We began digging on July 7th and are now in our second week of the field project which will end on August 9th. Our excavation project focuses on understanding what role earliest Egyptian civilization had on the rise of the first urban societies in Israel around 3,000 BC. Thus, we have selected a group of sites in the region of Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel which span the Chalcolithic period (ca. 4500-3500 BC) through the Early Bronze I period (ca. 3500-3000 BC) when the first complex societies and earliest cities evolved in this part of the Middle East.

Some of you may have seen our UCSD Summer Session Archaeological Field School Web site we set up earlier this year. If you look at that Web page, you can find out about our research design, see some of the new artifacts we have discovered, learn about our staff and much more. The aim of this new page is to give you a weekly up-date on some of our discoveries so that you can follow our results as they happen.... on-line. Thank you for visiting our page and let us know what you think.

With best wishes from the Negev desert,

Thomas Levy
Nahal Tillah Project Director
Professor, Department of Anthropology and Judaic Studies Program
University of California, San Diego



Click here to see the most recent summary of work done at the site.