Jaffa 2008 Overview

Aaron Burke

This grant will fund the publication of the Middle Bronze Age to Iron II (ca. 1900–539 BCE) stratigraphy and artifacts resulting from Jacob Kaplan’s excavations in Jaffa between 1955 and 1974.

Tel Yafo, ancient Jaffa, is situated south of the modern city of Tel Aviv on the coast of Israel between Caesarea and Gaza about 60 km northwest of Jerusalem. In addition to being one of the most prominent tells along the coast and a key port, Jaffa features a sprawling lower city. Thus, as a major port along the coast of the southern Levant with nearly continuous occupation from the Middle Bronze Age on Jaffa joins a select number of Canaanite sites that shared extensive connections with distant maritime commercial centers throughout the Mediterranean.

Despite Jaffa’s historical prominence and recognition of it importance as a major port along the coast of the southern Levant, more is known about the archaeology of Jaffa’s hinterland than of the city itself. Since 1948 nearly eighty permits have been issued for work at the site and yet scholarly understanding of the site’s cultural development and its relationship to its hinterland is shrouded by a lack of publication. The most extensive excavations undertaken at the site were conducted by Jacob Kaplan over twenty years from 1955 until 1974. During these excavations Kaplan succeeded in providing a view of the cultural history of the site from the Middle Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period (ca. 1900 to 332 BCE), which according to Kaplan constituted eight major stratigraphic phases.

In January 2007 Aaron Burke and Martin Peilstöcker, the co-directors of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, sought and received permission to publish the Middle Bronze Age to Iron II remains excavated by Jacob Kaplan, which are not covered by the publication agenda of the previous White-Levy grantee for Jaffa, Orit Tsuf. Thus, the current project will permit the publication of the artifacts and stratigraphy from the Middle Bronze Age to Iron II Period unearthed by Kaplan in Jaffa from 1955 to 1974 and thereby provide a complete archaeological sequence from the Middle Bronze Age to the Byzantine period when this work is taken together with Tsuf’s publication of the Persian to Byzantine artifacts and stratigraphy.