News from the Field 2023 Israel

In summer 2023, graduate student Kara Larson was principal investigator for an excavation project at Tell el-Hesi, Israel. She took a team of undergraduate students, graduate students, and professors from the University of Michigan, Mississippi State University, University of Manitoba, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Bar-Ilan University to run a three-week preliminary excavation to locate Early Bronze Age domestic structures. The field season was highly successful, locating two Early Bronze Age houses and a shared courtyard.

For an additional five weeks, Larson worked as a staff member and square supervisor for the Iron Age site of Khirbet Summeily in Israel. She brought several University of Michigan undergraduate students onto this project as well. The undergraduates who worked with Larson are Natalie Dziuban, Lily Heald, Anna Luurtsema, Elizabeth Meyer, Adam Perlstein, India Pruette, Paul Spens, Danielle Tutak, and Mya Welch.

Larson published a sole-authored paper on isotopes and secondary state formation in the Iron Age in southern Israel and continued analyzing isotopic results of recently sampled faunal remains from Tell el-Hesi.