Tel Tsaf
July 2024
israel
Portrait of a Middle Chalcolithic Society
Located near the city of Beit Shean in the Jordan Valley, less than an hour’s drive from the city of Haifa and the Mediterranean shore, the Middle Chalcolithic site of Tel Tsaf has long been considered one of the most promising sites for studying the transition to complex societies in the Near East. This large site is distinguished by its superb preservation of mudbrick architecture, burials, organic materials, evidence for large-scale storage and long-distance trade, and for having the earliest known metal object in the southern Levant.
The principal goals of the renewed project are to explore various aspects of social and economic organization at both the household and community levels during the Neolithic-Chalcolithic transition in the Near East and the establishment of the Mediterranean diet. The superb preservation of mudbrick architecture and organic remains at the sites offers ideal conditions to study these changes during the formative stages of the Late Chalcolithic period and the ecological settings of these changes.
The multinational team is composed of archaeologists, researchers, and experts in various fields, students, and volunteers from different countries around the globe who work shoulder to shoulder in the field and lab. This season they plan to continue in their efforts to retrieve bio-archaeological data to reconstruct the past environment in the Jordan Valley and better understand the site’s economy.
Details
Geographic Location
Central Jordan Valley, Northern Israel
Dates of the Dig
July 2024
Minimum Stay
1 Week
Application Due
Friday, January 5, 2024
Academic Credit/Cost per Credit/Institution
Contact for more details.
Accommodations
Volunteers will be housed in Kibbutz Kfar Rupin. We work Sunday-Thursday. Breakfast will be packed by us and taken to the site in the morning except for Sundays, and lunch will be eaten in the kibbutz (catering). We will organize dinners. The rooms (3-4 people to a room) have AC. The kibbutz has a mini-market and a swimming pool (we hope we will be able to enter the latter). Some evenings we will have lectures by members of the team.
Cost
Directors
Danny Rosenberg: University of Haifa
Florian Klimscha: German Archaeological Institute
Contact
Danny Rosenberg
+972 54-309-3666
To learn how you can get involved, visit their website and check them out on Facebook.
In the free eBook, A Digger’s Life: A Guide to the Archaeology Dig Experience, step into an archaeological excavation and find out what it takes to find, prepare for, and work on a dig.
