Thomas E. Levy

Overview

Thomas E. Levy is an American archaeologist and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands. His research concerns the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, in social change in the southern Levant from the Neolithic period through the Iron Age.

Excavations

Since 1997 Levy has directed fieldwork with Jordan's Department of Antiquities in the Faynan copper district of southern Jordan, including the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project and excavations at Khirbat en-Nahas, the largest Iron Age copper production center in the southern Levant. His team's high-precision radiocarbon dates, published in 2008, placed industrial-scale smelting there in the 10th and 9th centuries BC, pushing the accepted Iron Age chronology of Edom back by about two centuries. Erez Ben-Yosef, whose later work redated the copper industry of Timna Valley, was among his doctoral students.

Major Works and Recognition

Levy co-edited The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text and Science (2005) with Thomas Higham, and edited Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future: The New Pragmatism (2010), which received the Biblical Archaeology Society's award for best scholarly book in 2011. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.