Tel Kabri Excavation Project
Come dig with us at Tel Kabri during the summer of 2019! Help excavate a Canaanite palace more than 3,500 years old, with the oldest and largest wine cellar from the ancient Near East, and decorated with Minoan-style floor and wall paintings — which may be the earliest-known Western art yet found in the Eastern Mediterranean!
Located in a quiet rural setting within the western Galilee of Israel, the site of Tel Kabri is only a ten minute ride from the modern resort town of Nahariya, and a bit further from historical Acco, with its Medieval and Ottoman old city, fishing harbor, and traditional market. Today the Tel and its surroundings are an agricultural land, with lush plantations of bananas and avocados overlying the ancient remains.
Kabri represents one of the only possible opportunities available today in the Eastern Mediterranean to easily excavate a Middle Bronze Age Canaanite palace and to test some of the anthropological theories about the rise of archaic states and the nature of various political economies in the Aegean and the Near East.
The ready-available palace and settlement, with minimal overburden and with limited previous excavations, allows us to use modern methods such as residue analysis, petrographic analysis, detailed zooarchaeological study, neutron activation analysis, stable isotope analysis, and petrography to gain insights into some of the most important topics relevant to the understanding of complex human societies.
