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Levi-Sala Prize Winners Encourage Archaeology of Israel

July 2008

Last April, three books were awarded prestigious prizes at the 2008 Annual Irene Levi-Sala Research Seminar in Beer Sheva, Israel. The Irene Levi-Sala Prizes for Books in the Archaeology of Israel are given “to encourage and reward high-quality publications, both scholarly and popular, on the archaeology of Israel in the wider context of Near Eastern history and archaeology.”

First prize was awarded to Daphna Ben-Tor, Scarabs, Chronology and Interconnection (Fribourg: Academic Press/Gottingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), for the category of substantial synthesis.

Second prize, in the category of final excavation report, was given to Rudolph Cohen and Hannah Bernick-Greenberg for Excavations at Kadesh Barnea (Tell el-Qudeirat) 1976–1982, Part 1 and 2 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2007).

Third prize, for the category of semi-popular books, went to Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis—Settlement, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006).

According to the book prize committee, which included Professors Eliezer Oren (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Martha Sharp Joukowsky (Brown University), Larry Stager (Harvard University), Pierre de Miroschedji (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) and David Ussishkin (Tel Aviv ­University), the entries for the 2008 awards “exhibited a high level of scholarship and ... are certain to have an enormous impact on archaeological studies.”