עודכן: 19 בנוב׳ 2020
Dr. Sapir-Hen contribution , in a special addition of Biblical Archaeology Review for its 40th anniversary celebration, entitled "40 Futures: Experts Predict What's Next for Biblical Archaeology".
עודכן: 19 בנוב׳ 2020
Paper published in Antiquity 2014: 775-790.
Top Ten Biblical Archaeology Discoveris in 2014. Biblical Archaeology Society.
The popular image of metalworking sites in desert settings envisages armies of slaves engaged in back-breaking labour. This is in conflict with ethnographic evidence indicating that skilled specialist metalworkers are often accorded high social status. This study approaches that contradiction directly by studying the remains of domesticated food animals from domestic and industrial contexts at Timna in southern Israel. The authors demonstrate that the higher-value meat cuts come from industrial contexts, where they were associated with the specialist metalworkers, rather than the ‘domestic’ contexts occupied by lower status workers engaged in support roles. It is suggested that the pattern documented here could also have been a feature of early metalworking sites in other times and places.
The paper appeared in Tel Aviv 2013 40 (2): 277-285, and got a great attention in the media:
Data available until recently allowed only the general claim that (one humped) camels as pack animals were introduced to the southern Levant at an early phase in the Iron Age (11th – 9th centuries BCE). A recent study of faunal remains from Timna (Site 30 season 2009; Site 34, Season 2013), together with previous studies, enabled Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef to pinpoint this event more precisely, as reflected in the well dated, stratified copper smelting sites of the Wadi Arabah. The new evidence indicates that the first significant appearance of camel at the Wadi Arabah was not earlier than the last third of the 10th century BCE, coinciding with the military campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I to the region.
