Solving a 6,000 Year Old Murder Mystery

A lecture by Yuval Yekutieli, Department of Bible, Archaeology, and the Ancient Near East at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Thursday, October 6
7 p.m., Davis Auditorium, Skidmore College
The event is free and open to the public.

During an archaeological survey in the Judean Desert in the early 1960s, skeletons of 21 people were found in three caves located on a cliff towering above the canyon of Nahal Mishmar. The forensic report indicated that these ancient people suffered brutal blows before dying. The lecture will attempt to solve the riddle of their tragic death, locating it within a broader context of a theological upheaval shrouded in an even greater mystery. 

Yuval Yekutieli is a senior lecturer at the Department of Bible, Archaeology and the Ancient Near East at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer-Sheva, Israel), where he also served as head of the Archaeology Division from 2011 to 2013. Yuval was a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (2008–09) and at Oxford University (2015). Among his numerous field projects are a survey in the southern Judean Desert and the study of early Bronze Age activity in that region; a research of the miners' social landscape at the Timna copper mines during the late New Kingdom period (ca. 1400–1100 B.C.); and currently, renewed excavations at the early Bronze Age (ca. 3600–2600 B.C.) site of Tel Erani. He published on topics such as ancient colonialism, the archaeology of bonded labor, proto-urbanism, arid-zones archaeology, landscape archaeology, operation of power in antiquity, international relations during the Southern Levantine Bronze Ages (3600–1200 B.C.) and the early Bronze Age "Aniconic Reformation." 

Co-sponsored by the Office of Special Programs and the Departments of History and Anthropology.

The Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence Series is made possible by a gift from Jane Greenberg '81. The series enables the college to host an Israeli scholar who through teaching, lecturing and participating in campus life, educates the community on a range of topics concerning political life in the Middle East.