Directors
Finkelstein is the Laureate of the Dan David Prize in the Past Dimension, Archaeology, 2005. In 2009 he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and in 2010 received a doctorate Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Lausanne. Finkelstein is the winner of the Prix Delalande Guérineau (2014), awarded by the Institut de France, l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
Matthew J. Adams
Management of the Expedition
Margaret Cohen
Dr Margaret Cohen has taught ancient history and religious studies at Penn State University and Lycoming College in the U.S. Her research interests include compositional history of the biblical text, Iron Age cult, and ancient foodways, and her current project explores the role of the Jezreel Valley as depicted in the Hebrew Bible, and as supported by archaeology of the Iron Age, specifically as relates to the politics of food. She has excavated at numerous archaeological sites in Israel, Jordan and Egypt and is currently an associate fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.
Hadar Azrad
Hadar Azrad completed her B.A. degree in Archaeology and East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University and joined the staff of the Megiddo Expedition and office during the second year of her studies. She is currently working as an archaeologist and a teacher in the southern region’s educational unit of the IAA. Hadar is the registrar of the Megiddo Expedition during the field season.
Field Archaeologists:
Zach Dunseth
https://telaviv.academia.edu/ZachDunseth
Currently doing his post-doc at Brown University. Zach finished his PhD in Geoarchaeology under the supervision of Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Ruth Shahack-Gross of the University of Haifa. His dissertation focuses on the Intermediate Bronze Age (c. 2500-1950 BCE) settlement phenomena in the arid Negev Highlands through a microarchaeological perspective. Zach received his B.A. in Archaeology and Classics at George Washington University in Washington, DC, followed by an M.A. in Archaeology of Ancient Israel at Tel Aviv University.
Zach has excavated extensively in Israel, including Megiddo (2008, 2012-present), Tel Kabri (2009, 2013), Kirath-Jearim (2017), and for his PhD has led geoarchaeological investigations at a number of Early Bronze (c. 3600-2500 BCE) and Intermediate Bronze Age (c. 2500-1950 BCE) sites in the Negev Highlands (2012-present).
Assaf Kleiman
https://telaviv.academia.edu/AssafKleiman
Assaf Kleiman is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Minerva Stiftung at Leipzig University. He completed his dissertation in 2019 at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Israel Finkelstein and Prof. Benjamin Sass. His main research interests and scope of publications are the settlement history, material culture and cross-regional contacts of complex communities across the Iron Age Levant, specifically of those located in northeastern Israel, inland Lebanon and southern Syria. He is engaged in several field projects and a staff member of the Megiddo Expedition since 2010.
Eythan Levy
https://telaviv.academia.edu/EythanLevy
Eythan Levy has recently submitted a PhD in archaeology at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Profs. Israel Finkelstein, Eli Piasetzky and Alexander Fantalkin. He holds degrees in Computer Science (PhD 2009), Ancient Oriental Languages (MA 2012) and Archaeology (MA 2015). His main research interests are digital humanities/computer applications in archaeology, Iron Age chronology, Egypt and the Levant, and west-Semitic epigraphy. His former field experience includes Megiddo, Hazor, Tel Rehov, Dor, Khirbet Qeiyafa and Lachish. He recently began a postdoc at Bern University under Profs Stefan Münger and Silvia Schroer, on the subject of stamp seals from the southern Levant.
Juliane Stein
Juliane Stein studied Classical Archaeology and Prehistory at Leipzig University in Germany. She developed her research focus on the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant while spending part of her studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and participating in several excavation projects in Israel (Tell Keisan, Ashdod-Yam, Qubur al-Walaydah). Currently, she is pursuing her dissertation project, “Tell Rifaat/Arpad: Archaeology of an Aramaean(?) City,” with a focus on the 1st millennium BCE in Northern Syria in cooperation with the Ben-Gurion University and University College London. She is also a research assistant at the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Leipzig University. Juliane is an assistant area supervisor at Megiddo.
Shahar Gofer
Shahar Gofer’s main interest is the cultural connections between Egypt and the Southern Levant during the second millennium BCE. His M.A. thesis, supervised by Dr Deborah Sweeney and Dr Ido Koch from Tel Aviv University, deals with the visual and textual representations of the god Amun on stamp seals from the Southern Levant. Aside from his archaeological work, Shahar teaches history of architecture at Afeka College in Tel Aviv and leads tours to the Nile Valley in Egypt. Shahar is an assistant area supervisor at Megiddo.
Andrea Garza-Díaz-Barriga
Andrea is currently completing her M.A. degree in Archaeology and Ancient Israel Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her M.A. thesis is about the Common Ware Pottery Production Traditions found at the excavations of Magdala, under the supervision of Andrea Berlin and Oded Lipschits. Andrea studied her B.A. in Archaeology at Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in Mexico City. She excavated in Israel from 2011 to 2019 in the Magdala Archaeological Project by the Anahuac University of Mexico and worked on the analysis of ancient coins and their pattern distribution in the excavated areas of Magdala. For her is interesting to see how the Israeli and Mexican archaeological methodologies can speak the same systematic language. Andrea is an assistant area supervisor at Megiddo.
Reli Avisar
Reli Avisar is an art historian and a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, and she is writing her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Yuval Gadot and Dr Ido Koch. She completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees in Humanities and Art History in Barcelona, Spain. In her doctoral studies, she examines elite behaviour and consumption of luxury objects in the Late Iron Age Judah. She is an assistant area supervisor and the Head of the Megiddo Office at Tel Aviv University.
Technology in the Field
Peter Ostrin
Peter Ostrin provides IT and data recording support for the Megiddo Expedition. Peter works full time in high tech but is passionate about archaeology and looks forward to each dig season. He has studied Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Leicester and holds a Masters in Computer Science from Rice University. Peter is interested in how current technology can assist in excavation and interpretation and works alongside the archaeologists to help record and manage the enormous amounts of data generated during and after a season.
Collaborators in the Archaeosciences
Dafna Langgut (archaeobotany), Tel Aviv University
Lidar Sapir-Hen (archaeozoology), Tel Aviv University
Meirav Meiri (ancient DNA), Tel Aviv University
Rachel Kalisher (osteology), Brown University
The Megiddo Expedition 