The 2012 field season will be June 9th - July 20th.

 Learn more about volunteering for the 2012 field season.

Learn more about microarchaeology at Ashkelon in the January 10th, 2012 issue of the New York Times.

The Leon Levy Expedition is proud to make Ashkelon 1,  Ashkelon 2, and Ashkelon 3 available to download.

 

Summary of 2011 Field Season

This summer, more than one hundred students and professionals worked together over six weeks to study the archaeology of the Mediterranean world in general and the city of Ashkelon in particular.  The discoveries made during the 2011 season of the Leon Levy Expedition will reshape our understanding of Ashkelon for years to come.  

One of our most interesting research projects appeared unexpectedly.   In December of 2010, the entire coast of Israel faced severe Mediterranean storms, and the coast of Ashkelon suffered substantial damage.  Read more about it here. This natural disaster, however, provided a chance for our expedition to see into the depths of the mound of Ashkelon, and this summer we were able to carefully record the damaged portion of the tell.  Our work, led by Stephen Moshier of Wheaton College, uncovered a geological and archaeological sequence extending from the bedrock below the city all the way through the last crusader walls.   Not only did this work inform us about the development of ancient Ashkelon, it will serve as a clear baseline for studying the erosional problems that plague the Ashkelon shoreline to this day.

 On the mound itself, teams worked in different areas.  Each had their own chronological focus and historical questions.   Joshua Walton of Harvard University led a team studying the ancient Philistines.  His group uncovered new evidence for Ashkelon in the eleventh and tenth century BC, the period when the Philistines tried and failed to conquer the hills to the east.  Kate Birney of Wesleyan University glimpsed the end of the Philistines, at the time they were destroyed by the Babylonians.  But her team spent most of its time trying to understand how Ashkelon was transformed from a 5th century Phoenician colony under the Persian empire to a fully-fledged Hellenistic polis just two centuries later.   Tracy Hoffman led another team, which attempted to understand the ways in which the public institutions of Roman Ashkelon were transformed by the rise of Byzantium and later by the Muslim conquest.   Finally, Philip Johnston of Harvard University, with the assistance of a team from Hebrew University, probed the Fatamid fortifications of Ashkelon, attempting to determine how the site was destroyed and rebuilt during the time of the Crusades.

Each of these ongoing research projects adds to our understanding of the history of Ashkelon – a history that is being discovered and recorded by the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon.   As we continue our new discoveries, we are excited to be able to bring you a summary of our results from 1985-2004 in the form of two final report volumes:  Ashkelon 1 and Ashkelon 2.  These two volumes provide over 900 pages of information on the ancient city of Ashkelon and can be downloaded free of charge due to the generous sponsorship of the Leon Levy Foundation. For those scholars who need the printed volumes, please note that they are still for sale at Eisenbrauns.  These volumes – both in their publication, and now in their free distribution – reaffirm  our commitment to making the result of our excavation available to the widest possible audience, so that all can appreciate appreciate and learn from the wonders of the history of Ashkelon.