Finally! Official announcement of the SSHRC grant for the EB at Tell es-Safi/Gath

After waiting some two months for the official announcement from the Canadian SSHRC, we can now finally put this up:

Prof. Haskel Greenfield (University of Manitoba) and Prof. Aren Maeir (Bar-Ilan University) have been awarded a seven year, large-scale grant from the Canadian government’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council for the study of the Early Bronze Age remains at the site of Tell es-Safi/Gath in Israel.

The project is entitled “The nature of early urban neighbourhoods in the southern Levant: Early Bronze Age at Tell es-Safi”, and will involve five years of excavation and two years of post-excavation analysis.

The CAN$2.7 million grant (with institutional matching actually reaching close to CAN$4 million) aims to carry out an interdisciplinary study of the Early Bronze Age III city at Tell es-Safi/Gath, with particular focus on the non-elite neighborhoods. In collaboration with a diverse group of scholars from Canada, Israel and other countries, and utilizing macro- and micro-archaeological perspectives, they plan to study facets of daily life in one of the larger cities of the first stage of urban culture in the Southern Levant. The large scale funding will enable a broad range of cutting-edge technological and analytical techniques to be used in this research, as well as comprehensive training of the next generation of students.

This research is conducted as part of the Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project, directed by Prof. Aren Maeir, which is a long-term project (commenced in 1996) aimed at studying the cultural and environmental history of the site of Tell es-Safi/Gath and its environs.

Woohoo!

:-)

Aren