Israel, Land of Cultural Treasures

Aaron A. Burke is Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant, and the Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He is also a faculty member of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, where he is currently editor-in-chief of its press. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology from The Oriental Institute at The University of Chicago in 2004. From 2011 to 2014, as director of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, he conducted excavations of a New Kingdom Egyptian fortress in Jaffa, Israel, which were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2017, expanding upon his research in Jaffa, he inaugurated, Turning Points, an initiative aimed at exploring the broad context of the transition between the Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, ca. 1200–1000 B.C. out of which ancient Israel emerged. In addition to his monograph, “Walled Up to Heaven”: The Evolution of Middle Bronze Age Fortification Strategies in the Levant (Eisenbrauns, 2008), he has written extensively on warfare and society in the Bronze and Iron ages, and has co-edited three volumes resulting from directing archaeological work in Jaffa. His interests include the archaeology of Ancient Israel, warfare, and identity negotiations and cultural transformations in the Bronze and Iron Ages in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean with particular attention to the archaeology of forced migration and the identification of ensuing cultural changes. He has excavated in Israel, Turkey, and Egypt, and travelled as well throughout Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece. He is President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.