Research

The desire for metals has always sparked technological and economic change, from the time metal was domesticated in the fifth millennium B.C. The control of metal gave people either social power or real economic power, as it still does today. My research explores the role of technology and metallurgy in social evolution.

A spectacularly beautiful area of Jordan called Faynan. Faynan lies about 50 km south of the Dead Sea, and 40 km north of the famous site of Petra, and encompassed the largest copper ore district in the ancient Levant. The landscape is a giant series of canyons, with these dry wadis (seasonal drainages) that cut through the area from a high plateau 1,300 meters above sea level all the way down to the Araba Valley that separates southern Jordan and Israel. Three thousand years ago it was a bleak place for slaves to be, if they were required to mine copper. In 2011, it’s a great place for undergrads, if they want to get credit in our archaeological field school.

Up until historical biblical times, people mostly dug it out from visible outcrops up and down the wadis. In the Iron Age, from 1200-850 B.C., things really changed and you have the first industrial revolution in the southern Levant. Over three excavation seasons, my research team focused on a specific site called Khirbat en-Nahas, which means “the ruins of copper” in Arabic.

You can see vast expanses of black slag, the waste from smelting copper, just lying over the sandy soil, where it sticks out like a sore thumb. The slag mounds are easily seen in Google Earth imagery. In biblical times, this region was called EDOM (red in Hebrew) because of beautiful Nubian red sandstone that covers the whole area.

Both the expanse of the slag sites and their contents show us how the scale of copper production increased exponentially in the Iron Age, compared to other periods. Through our strati-graphic excavations (layer by layer), we’ve been able to document changes in technology, such as diameter of the pipes used to force air into the smelting furnaces. Over a period of 150 years, from the late 10th to ninth century BC, measurements made by my doctoral student Erez Ben-Yosef indicate that these pipes doubled in diameter. We were also able to document the amount of copper in the slag, using x-ray fluorescence. The amount of metal retained in the slag through time diminished, which tells us they were getting more efficient with their smelting technology.

We live in tent camps without electricity on the edge of a Bedouin village. We have Jordanian Bedouin workers and usually around 30 UCSD graduate and undergraduate students. The field work is carried out with my research partner, Dr. Mohammad Najjar, formerly with the Department of Antiquities in Jordan. Day-to-day life is up at 4 a.m., coffee, and then jump in a four-wheel-drive pickup truck to head out to field. While we don’t have electricity or Internet in camp, we do have electricity in a Bedouin house we rent in the village. 

As you approach the house, it looks like a typical village, with donkeys outside. But once you’re inside, you’d think you were in our lab at UC San Diego. So we do state-of-the-art cyber-archaeology in a remote Middle Eastern desert where our students play a key role in researching the past.  

The early Iron Age was a critical time in biblical history, when the united monarchy (King David and King Solomon), if you go by the Old Testament, came on the scene. There’s a lot of debate among biblical scholars, archaeologists and ancient historians about just how historical David and Solomon were. These are the kinds of questions tackled in my new book. I use modern tools, such as high-precision radiocarbon dating and digital archaeology, to take a pragmatic approach to historical biblical archaeology. 

When we do biblical archaeology, we’re not dealing with issues of faith. Faith transcends the academy. We are interested in looking at, in my case, the Hebrew bible, as another one of the ancient Near Eastern literatures. We approach it in as unbiased a way as possible.

There are biblical maximalists and minimalists. The minimalists would say the Old Testament has no history in it, it’s all myth. The maximalists think everything in the Bible really happened. However, nuggets of history are found in the Bible’s “footnotes,” in the throwaway lines in the Hebrew Bible. In other words, history may be found in the small details, where the writers didn’t have any particular ax to grind. 

It’s a kind of digital archaeology, where we use sophisticated digital recording techniques such as GPS to record and measure artifacts and features exposed in scientific excavations. For archaeologists, the two most important tools are control of time and space. Space refers to the cultural context of artifacts. The more precision — in terms of x, y, z, coordinates — we have in recording exactly where artifacts and buildings are located, the more we can understand the past. Couple that with high-precision radiocarbon dating to control time, and suddenly it’s possible to precisely identify something that might have happened in the 10th century B.C. These tools put us in a whole new ballpark concerning history and the Bible.

We use the data to do scientific visualization of the archaeological sites. For example, when we excavated one of these ancient slag mounds, we dug down about over 22 feet, layer by layer, and recorded thousands of artifacts. It’s very hard to get your mind around the spatial relationships of such a huge data set. But we can now stand at the bottom of the excavation in virtual reality, as if you were right there the day we excavated it, and we can hit a button and see where all the artifacts are, and we can tell which are the furnace fragments, and which are the tuyère (blow) pipes, and where they probably all fit together.

3-D visualization theaters like the NexCAVE or StarCAVE at UC San Diego, which my colleague Tom DeFanti developed, have been game changers for archaeologists because they can handle vast amounts of data. We’ve recorded so much data with such precision for so long, that we were pre-adapted to throwing our data into these 3-D environments.  These visualization caves let you can look at the data in new ways that you simply can’t see on paper. 

Through UC San Diego’s California Center of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a small research group called the Center for the Interdisciplinary Science of Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). Before Calit2 came to our campus, it was more difficult to do true collaborative work. Calit2 created an opportunity for people from many different fields to take advantage of the information technology revolution.  It’s really exciting. It’s like being in a different university.