New Course Will Expose the Masses to the Archaeology of Israel

TORONTO - Sept. 21, 2014 - PRLog -- Beginning in late October, a new series of courses will be offered by archaeologist Dr. David Lipovitch. This eight-week long series, it is hoped, will mark the beginning of a regular series of public lectures on the art, history, and archaeology of the ancient Near East. The first course, entitled The Archaeology of Ancient Canaan, Israel, and Judah will be offered every Wednesday evening from 7-9 PM at Innis College on the University of Toronto St. George Campus from October 29th through December 17th, 2014. Tuition for the course is $150.

The classes will cover the archaeology of what is today modern Israel and Jordan and what was in the past the home of the Canaanites, Israelites, Judahites, Aramaeans, Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines. Students will learn about the cultures that have inhabited the region for more than a million years from the earliest Homo erectus finds to the Roman conquest of Judea. Subject covered will included the arrival of our ancestors in the region, the development of agriculture and the earliest domestication of plants and animals, the development of pottery, the first steps at urbanization, the rise and fall of the Canaanites, and the appearance of the key players in the Hebrew Bible including the Israelites, Philistines, and Aramaeans.  Students will see the rise and fall of the cultures that wrote the Old Testament and after their return from exile the creation of a new Jewish culture that will under Rome become the basis for early Christianity and the New Testament.

According to Dr. Lipovitch, “all of Western Civilization ultimately has its roots in the societies of the ancient Near East for it is from there that new technologies like agriculture, pottery, and writing spread to the rest of the Mediterranean Basin and ultimately through the rest of Europe.  The region is also the source of three of the world’s great religions. For a member of any of these faith communities to understand the roots of their own religions, they must understand the context in which they developed. The Old Testament was written about life in the ancient Near East. It reflects the historical realities of the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages. One cannot genuinely understand the events of the Bible without understanding the context in which they occur. I also believe that by learning about the history of the region in antiquity, it may be possible to better understand current events in the modern Middle East.”

Dr. Lipovitch has studied the ancient world since he was a child fascinated by the archaeology and mythology of Egypt, the Aztecs, and countless other cultures of antiquity. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto – after a brief diversion in physical chemistry – he enrolled in double majors studying anthropology and the archaeology of the ancient Near East. Thanks to the encouragement of his mentors there he decided after completing an Honours BA in 1989, to continue his studies and earned an AM (1993) and a PhD (1999) in Hebrew Bible and archaeology from Harvard University. While working on his various degrees he excavated and surveyed in southern Ontario working with both prehistoric Native Canadian sites and historic Euro-Canadian sites, and at Ashkelon, Israel. His dissertation, Can These Bones Live Again? An Analysis of the Persian Period Non-Candid Mammalian Faunal Remains from Tel Ashkelon, examined a poorly understood time period at this important Canaanite, Philistine, and Phoenician site and introduced him to the subfield of zooarchaeology (his current specialty)– the study of animal remains in archaeology. Since then he has continued to work on or with excavations in Ontario, Israel, Jordan, and Turkey where he is currently the Staff Zooarchaeologist at the University of Toronto’s excavations at Tell Ta’yinat.

Dr. Lipovitch has been giving public lectures since the 1990s and has done so in three different countries and three different languages. He is an award-winning educator who has taught everything from kindergarten to graduate school. He continues to be an active researcher in archaeology and is currently a Research Affiliate at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations.

For more information about how to take this course, attend a scheduled lecture, or acquire Dr. Lipovitch’s services, check out his website at http://www.theancientworld.ca or email him at dlipovitch@theancientworld.ca.