Haskel Greenfield

Overview

Haskel Greenfield is an archaeologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba, and a zooarchaeologist: a specialist in what animal bones reveal about the people who left them. He co-directs the excavation of the Early Bronze Age levels at Tell es-Safi, the site of biblical Gath, and he analyses the faunal remains from the excavations at Tel Shiloh.

Academic Career

Greenfield took his doctorate in anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1985 and has taught at Manitoba since 1989, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 2015. He also co-directs the university's Near Eastern and Biblical Archaeology Laboratory. He was elected a foreign member of Academia Europaea in 2024 and is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.

Major Works and Contributions

His research covers the rise of early agricultural and complex societies across the Old World from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, and within that the evidence of butchering technology, herding and the origins of metallurgy. At Tell es-Safi he co-directs the Early Bronze Age excavations with Aren Maeir and is a co-editor of the volume publishing that work. He has also directed excavations at Ndondondwane in South Africa and fieldwork in Serbia and Romania.

Work at Shiloh

Greenfield is the zooarchaeologist for the excavations at Tel Shiloh directed by Scott Stripling. The favissa in Area D produced more than ten thousand animal bones, and it is faunal analysis that turns such a deposit into evidence: which species are present, in what proportions, and how the bones were cut. The excavators report that the assemblage is overwhelmingly from species permitted for sacrifice under the Levitical rules, which is one of the grounds on which they argue the deposit is Israelite rather than Canaanite.