Dangerous work

Beneath a tall mound at Tel Shimron in northern Israel, under last summer’s constant threat of rocket fire, Daniel Master and his team uncovered a huge pit of buried treasure. It was full to the brim with one of the richest troves of Bronze Age artifacts ever found in the Levant.

The cache’s thick, mud-brick walls held the remains of Canaanite cultic ceremonies—bronze statuettes of bull deities, 40,000 animal bones, thousands of pottery sherds, and elegantly decorated vessels, including one of the only Minoan jugs ever found in Israel.

Master, a professor of archaeology at Wheaton College, has co-directed excavations at Tel Shimron since its preliminary surveys in 2015. He typically brings a team of students with him every year. But since the Israel-Hamas war began, it’s been impossible to conduct a field school, or “in any way think about business as usual,” he said.

But last summer, Master pulled together a small team of professional archaeologists to conduct six weeks of excavations—work that ended up uncovering the treasure trove.

“We were there because we wanted to show our support for our archaeological colleagues at Tel Aviv University,” he said. “Everything else was just kind of a sideline.”

Israel’s effort to defeat terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah damaged or destroyed many important archaeological sites in Gaza and Lebanon—and halted work at hundreds more. And while the Iron Dome missile defense system has protected most sites in Israel so far, the risk of incoming rocket fire has slowed or stopped many of Israel’s excavations. Despite the dangers and challenges, Biblical archaeologists are finding ways to continue their work.

Israel has around 35,000 archaeological sites in its 8,630 square miles. This isn’t the first time they’ve shut down. The 1967 Six-Day War caused a decades-long suspension of archaeological activity in the West Bank region. Successive conflicts also stalled work. Almost no excavation took place between 2020 and 2021 due to Israel’s tight COVID-19 restrictions. Most outside teams and researchers weren’t allowed to resume archaeological work in Israel until 2022. Some sites remain open now, but most—especially near the Gaza border and in northern Israel—are closed or only worked by Israeli teams.

Tel Shimron is one of the sites in northern Israel that’s partially open. The ancient settlement in the Jezreel Valley has a history stretching from the Canaanites to the 20th century. The dig is a partnership between Wheaton and Israel’s Tel Aviv University, so the site usually swarms with a mixture of scholars, archaeology students, and volunteers every summer. Wheaton’s programs require at least one season of on-site experience. “Many, many students come for more than one,” Master said.

But the situation in northern Israel last summer was too dangerous to bring in a Wheaton team. “I wouldn’t willingly take students into a situation where I thought [rocket fire] was a likely outcome. I wouldn’t take staff members into that situation either,” Master said.

Though central Israel is currently a little safer than the northern areas, few sites there have hosted archaeology students from outside the country since the war began. Tel Burna is one exception. The fortified city in Galilee, which possibly corresponds to the Biblical city Libnah, was most heavily populated during the Bronze Age, around 1,200 years before Christ. The excavation’s Israeli director, Itzick Shai, is a professor at Ariel University.

Shai typically relies on American teams of students from Colorado Christian University and Lipscomb University to help Israeli students and volunteers during the summer excavation season. His colleagues at Colorado Christian said they’d try to come but eventually canceled their 2024 trip due to liability and safety concerns. The Lipscomb team ended up bringing about 15 students.

College archaeology students uncover and clean a human skeleton found on the site of the first Philistine cemetery ever discovered in Ashkelon, Israel, several years ago. Dan Porges / Getty Images

Shai was glad to have them, but the responsibility of having volunteers on-site during a war weighed heavily on him.

“I have to make sure that they are all OK, no missiles or something coming … so I have to be honest, once we finished everything I [could] breathe,” he said.

The war has affected Shai’s work in other ways. For several months after Oct. 7, 2023, Shai took time away from archaeology to volunteer as an agricultural worker. Once a week, he drove to southern Israel and worked in the tomato and pineapple fields, taking the place of workers who’d been called up for military service.

Now he’s back to full-time archaeology and teaching, but the war is ever-present. “Last week I went to work, and on the way, I had to stop my car, get out of the car, and lay on the road, because we had [rocket attack] sirens,” he told me late last year.

But the war doesn’t diminish the importance of unearthing historical items from Biblical times, Shai said. “You don’t have to be a believer, but the Bible is the foundation of the Western world, and to touch it and to understand it and to debate it—this is very exciting.”

Master has a more distinctly Christian perspective. “By understanding [ancient cultures] we can read the Biblical text better, more carefully, more accurately,” he said. “Conversely, as we read the Biblical text, it tells us about things that we would never learn just by looking at the artifacts that come out of the ground … they work hand in hand.”

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS are also a piece of the fierce debate over who has a right to live in Israel and Gaza.

Israel’s Knesset is currently discussing an amendment to its antiquities law that would place archaeological sites in the contested West Bank under the purview of the Israel Antiquities Authority instead of the military’s Civil Administration office. Right-wing Israeli groups including Israel’s Heritage Preservation Center have urged the change for several years after its 2020 survey concluded that 80% of West Bank archaeological sites are badly damaged. Many Israeli activists believe Palestinians deliberately destroy antiquities to erode Israel’s claim on the land.

But Gazans accuse Israel of doing the same thing. In a Nov. 25 statement, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of tourism and antiquities, Hani Al-Hayek, claimed the Israel Defense Forces have deliberately targeted Gazan historical sites to “erase the history” and national identity of Palestinian people. (The IDF did not directly respond to these allegations, but its guidelines for operations near antiquities in Gaza include attempting to “rescue whatever possible, subject to the strategic possibilities,” according to a Haaretz report.) Birzeit University, south of Gaza City, also alleged the IDF looted thousands of artifacts from the school’s museum, then bombed it to “cover up.”

Aerial view of Tel Shimron. Tel Shimron Excavations / Andrew Wright

Gazan media reports say about 200 of the area’s 325 registered archaeological sites have already been damaged or destroyed in the latest conflict. Although numbers from Hamas-affiliated groups can’t be independently verified, other sources offer similar tallies. The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa Project estimates that at least half of Gaza’s heritage sites have suffered damage. That includes sites dating back to Biblical times, like the ancient Greek city of Anthedon, now called Blakhiya, hit directly by Israeli strikes.

Archaeological work in Gaza is rare due to the region’s tumultuous political situation. But René Elter of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem spent 20 years traveling back and forth into Gaza to excavate and moved there permanently in 2019. He evacuated in 2023 after spending a month under Israeli bombardment.

Several of the sites Elter excavated, including early Christian churches and a Roman necropolis, are now damaged. As of November, refugees were living in the visitor center of the fourth-century St. Hilarion Monastery. Elter has also seen a video, posted on social media by the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, showing Israeli soldiers looking through artifacts in his school’s Gaza City warehouse.

“The soldiers opened boxes. We don’t know if they took anything,” Elter told AFP.

In Lebanon, the government received enhanced UNESCO protection for 34 heritage sites in late 2024, but by then Israeli bombs had already flattened much of ancient Tyre’s hinterland in the south. Helene Sader, a professor of archaeology at the American University of Beirut, said a strike also hit Tell el-Burak, the archaeological site south of Sidon she was excavating before the Israel-Hezbollah war began in 2023. But news reports are vague—Sader doesn’t know if the bombs fell on or just near the site. She said archaeologists can’t assess most of the damage until the Lebanese army declares southern Lebanon clear of Hezbollah’s forces.

Israel’s tenuous ceasefire with Hezbollah is good news for archaeologists working in northern Israel at sites like Tel Shimron—if it holds. Israel’s military operations in Syria after the fall of Assad’s regime may also spark further conflict in the north.

Master said it’s too soon to tell whether excavations will be able to resume as normal this summer. But compared with the difficulties his Israeli colleagues face, Master said “not having students at Tel Shimron … is such a minor point.”

But Shai is already organizing his team’s next dig season at a new site near Tel Burna—Khirbet ‘Ether. Students from Lipscomb University are planning to return, and Shai said he anticipates having many volunteers as well. It’ll be a smaller group than before the war, and he’ll likely bear the weight again of making sure everyone is safe.

On the other hand, Shai said, “the feeling that volunteers are still coming, it says a lot … that people support us.”