Liora Freud

Overview

Liora Freud is an Israeli archaeologist and a specialist in ancient pottery, chiefly of the Iron Age and the Persian period. She is project coordinator at the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and she reads the pottery for the excavations at Tel Shiloh, where she provides a ceramic report each season on the site's earlier material.

Academic Career

Freud took her doctorate at Tel Aviv University in 2019 with a dissertation on Judahite pottery in the transitional phase between the Iron Age and the Persian period, examining Jerusalem and its surroundings, supervised by Oded Lipschits. She trained on the Beer-Sheba Valley assemblages under Itzhak Beit-Arieh and has worked on the pottery of Ramat Rahel, whose renewed excavations of 2005 to 2010 she is coordinating for publication, and of Khirbet er-Ras, Tel Ira, Horvat Qitmit, Horvat Uza and Tel Malhata.

Ceramic Work

She is the registrar and pottery expert of the Lautenschlager Azekah Expedition. Her published work includes a study of the pottery of Babylonian-period Jerusalem from the summit of the southeastern hill, and a report on the Iron Age and Persian period pottery from Ras el-Amud in Jerusalem. The period she works on is the one in which the pottery record is hardest to read and most consequential, since the century between the fall of Jerusalem and the Persian return leaves little else to date a layer by.

Relevance to the Biblical Record

Pottery is how a deposit gets a date, and a date is what decides whether a layer belongs to the world the biblical text describes or to another one. At Shiloh that question is live: the dating of the favissa on the northeastern terrace, and with it the argument over who left the offerings, rests on reading the pottery. Freud's contribution to the site is the seasonal ceramic analysis on which such arguments depend, from the Middle Bronze Age down to the Persian period.