Professor Burke's remarks underscore the importance of archaeological studies in Israel, highlight UCLA's contributions to the archaeology of Israel, and explain how these findings have made profound contributions to our study of human society.

 On January 13, 2026, UCLA Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant Aaron A. Burke made the following introduction for UCLA Professor of Biblical Studies William Schniedewind's lecture "Excavating Tell Shaddud: Archaeology's Enduring Value for Understanding the Land and its People."

Thank you, Steve, for that introduction and, most of all, thank you for advancing a vision of a full-bodied study of Israel’s past and present, one that recognizes the role that archaeology plays. I also want to thank Michael Cooperson, chair of the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department, Jason de León, director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies for supporting today’s talk.

Steve has asked me to introduce Bill today, and to frame his efforts to support archaeology in Israel by recounting the role that UCLA has played in it to date.

I want to begin by addressing the elephant in the room that is perhaps all too familiar to those of us who work in the field of archaeology today. As a social-scientific method for understanding the human past, archaeology is rooted in classical humanistic interests. Although reductionist efforts in some quarters have sought to paint archaeology, generally, as an extension of the “museum project” or as having statist interests, the truth is that archaeology itself does not take sides even if some of its practitioners sometimes do. This might be an unpopular concept in our present moment, but if archaeology is to be identified as a legitimate tool for understanding past human societies, then like linguistics, biology, or geography, it must make possible our consideration of evidence from a sometimes neglected quarter that must be taken up in free academic and public discourse. Few places in the world embody a robust discourse that archaeology can engender as has occurred in Israel.

Archaeology in Israel has made profound contributions to our study of human society, from the study of the earliest hominids to debates surrounding the settlement landscape of the Ottoman period. At every turn, it has continued to illuminate the relationship of the region’s inhabitants to their neighbors and the recognition of its multicultural and diverse social mosaic. As everywhere, Israel itself has experienced conflict but also periods of harmony and community, which are all too easily forgotten and that do not make headlines. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, most of these human narratives fall in the domain of archaeology to expose, as the vicissitudes of history mean that our written accounts are far too few and most often simply do not exist. But even when we possess written sources, robust debates are created because the witness of archaeology, which gives voice to the voiceless and alternative perspectives that challenge reigning orthodoxies. Again, almost nowhere else and at no other point in human history has this played out as intensively as it has in Israel over the past three-quarters of a century.

But archaeology, be it in Israel or elsewhere, is not simply a “handmaiden of history” or a tool for the study of identity. Today, archaeology is an exceedingly diverse discipline and, again, nowhere in the world has rivaled Israel’s contribution. Let me underscore this by simply listing some examples of fields to which it has contributed, and in so doing to underscore how inextricable archaeology is to many other modern disciplines and concerns: education; urban planning; transportation development; agriculture including horticulture and viticulture; land management; hydrology; environmental conservation; biology; climate change; physics and mathematics; and recreation, to name but a few of the prominent examples. My point is simple, but important. Archaeology is exactly the type of discipline the academy needs more than ever, laying at the center of many concerns as it seeks to confront academic orthodoxies and revive rigorous and free discourse of important if sometimes difficult subjects.

Over more than twenty years now, UCLA has made its own mark in the archaeology of Israel and, as will become evident, also through the unique contribution of our speaker. I began my own career here at UCLA as an archaeologist of ancient Israel and the Levant in 2005. In 2007, I launched The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, a multi-disciplinary effort to understand the archaeology and history of the city and environs of Jaffa, the core of modern Tel Aviv, its more well known suburb established only in 1909. For a decade, in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority and under the watchful eye of the Old Jaffa Development Corporation, we conducted excavations on the mound that represents 4,000 years of habitation in Jaffa. Numerous graduate students, who now hold positions at leading research universities from Harvard to the University of Illinois, worked to document the finds from earlier excavations at the site that we were charged with excavating and publishing, which was made possible through the support of various entities at UCLA including the International Institute and from outside by the National Endowment for the Humanities. To date the project has published two volumes through the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press on The History and Archaeology of Jaffa, embodying a broad cultural-heritage approach to the site’s history, which has taken as its starting point that, as a palimpsest, most of Jaffa’s archaeology can only be addressed in relationship to preceding developments. As the project moves towards final publication in one last excavation report, it continues to make unique contributions to our understanding that reach far beyond the site itself. Our radiocarbon-derived dates for the destruction of Jaffa’s New Kingdom Egyptian fortress, for example, stand as no less than the proxy dates for the end of Egypt’s empire in Canaan (ca. 1125 BCE); we could also speak of the analysis of one of the earliest Canaanite inscriptions conducted by our speaker and his graduate student, Matthew Suriano—now at the University of Maryland.

After Jaffa, our fieldwork moved to Tel Dan near the border with Lebanon in 2018, where UCLA graduate students labored on both sides of the pandemic to expose habitation relating to the crucible moment in the emergence of ancient Israel during the early Iron Age—not within the confines of a bustling city but ensconced within a national park at the foot of Mount Hermon. Alongside these fieldwork efforts, graduate students of our program, with interests cultivated in the archaeology of Israel and supported by UCLA, have made important contributions at numerous other sites in Israel that read like Israel’s greatest archaeological hits of the past twenty years: Hazor, Megiddo, Keisan, Qeiyafa, Azekah, Tel Burnah, Shimron, and Jerusalem. They have also taken what they have learned in Israel to their own work in countries throughout the region beyond Israel, to Tunisia, Jordan, Cyprus, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Spain.

That’s a long introduction, but I hope one that helps usefully frame today’s talk.

William Schniedewind, is Professor of Biblical Studies and Northwest Semitic Languages in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Bill served for more than 13 years as the chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. His efforts not only established my position in the archaeology of ancient Israel, but also led to the recruitment of many of our colleagues in ancient Near Eastern and Jewish studies. Most recently, he serves as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director for the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies here at UCLA.

Bill’s career has embodied the integration of the study of geography and archaeology of ancient Israel with the study of the Hebrew Bible. His many Ph.d. students have gone on to positions at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, the universities of Maryland and Iowa, Emory, and many others. Attracting the interest of the late Norma Kershaw, a patroness of the archaeology of Israel, he went on to be the inaugural Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies. His work with Norma Kershaw also led to the establishment of a bequest for the Kershaw Postdoctoral Fellowship, which we are happy to announce has just matriculated its first holder, Erin Hall, who received her Ph.D. in archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

I could go on to mention the many books and articles that Bill has written on the history of the writing of the Hebrew Bible that engage archaeology as a crucial data source, like Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes (Princeton 2024). But my introduction has been too long already.

So, without further ado, please help me welcome Bill as he presents gleanings from his most recent archaeological endeavor: “Excavating Tell Shaddud.”