Ariel David is an editor at Haaretz English, and a Tel Aviv-based foreign correspondent for Italian and English-language publications. He worked for five years as AP's correspondent in Rome, covering Italy and the Vatican.
The method has a substantial ick factor, but human and animal waste incorporated in mud bricks over centuries can reliably indicate the age of structures, archaeologists say
Forensic analysis of texts found at Tel Arad shows at least 12 different authors, giving clues about literacy in ancient Judah and when the oldest books in the Bible were first written
The palace was likely built in the early seventh century B.C.E. in King Hezekiah's time, after Jerusalem had survived a siege by the Assyrians – capitals uncovered show palm tree motif typical of Kingdom of Judah
Israeli archaeologist says he found 3,000-year-old clay head depicting the biblical God of Israel. Colleagues respond the image doesn’t represent Yahweh, a deity and maybe not even a man
How did Sennacherib’s forces breach the Judahite defenses at Azekah in 701 B.C.E? It seems they repurposed the remains of a 1,000-year-old city wall, fashioning it into an attack ramp
Why did the ancient Judahites pile up huge heaps of stones and soil near their capital? The recent dig at one of these mounds has only deepened the enigma surrounding these structures
Floor tiles from house burnt down by the Babylonians 2,600 years ago yield data that could help better understand the erratic behavior of the planetary shield protecting us from cosmic radiation
Little remained of the 12th century site of war after centuries of construction. Now an archaeologist has deduced where the Arsuf battle should have taken place
Byzantine settlers in the Negev were making good coin by growing grapes and exporting booze around the world 1,500 years ago. Then came eruptions and the Justinian Plague
Study of human remains found in Hyksos capital Avaris suggests that century of their rule over Nile Delta was not the result of conquest but rise to power of longtime immigrants from the Levant
Crudely shaped flints found in Kharaysin could be figurines used in Neolithic ceremonies in which bones were buried and exhumed, study suggests
Study of shells found in caves in northern Israel shows prehistoric humans invented string much earlier than previously thought – between 160,000 and 120,000 years ago
A century before Vesuvius leveled Pompeii, a mega-volcano half a world away triggered famine that was the last straw for the declining Roman Republic and let tyrants rise
Great house with Christian symbols in the Byzantine town of Pi Metzuba also had a mosaic with pagan motifs, including animals and a goddess
Study of naming traditions shows First Temple-period biblical authors knew a lot about what was going on in Judah, but were less informed on the neighboring kingdom of Israel
Radiocarbon dating reveals who really built Wilson’s Arch, a massive causeway whose construction on the Temple Mount has been attributed to everyone from Herod to the Muslim caliphs
Today’s Jews and Arabs in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria get half their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantines, who descended from a mix of locals and migrants from Iran or the Caucasus
Analysis of altar residue shows worshippers burned pot at a Judahite desert shrine – and may have done the same at the First Temple in Jerusalem
Remains of a modern human 45,000 years old found in the Balkans show our ancestors coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe for around 8,000 years
WATCH: How oldest Torah scroll found in a synagogue was read despite being burned to a crisp ■ Now manuscripts from the Second Temple Period that are too brittle to even touch may be deciphered using cutting-edge physics
Neolithic hunter-gatherers who erected massive monoliths in central Turkey 11,500 years ago had command of geometry and a much more complex society than previously thought, archaeologists say
Shaped stone spheres were part of early humanity’s toolkit for over two million years, but what exactly they were used for has remained an enigma. Until now
Why the ancients used eggs from savage wild ostriches rather than innocuous tame ones is unclear, but ornate eggshells from the Middle East were prized by elites across the Mediterranean thousands of years before Easter was a thing
Sequencing from a second tooth ‘only’ 800,000 years old provided researchers with key information on the position of the enigmatic Homo antecessor in our evolutionary tree
All scroll fragments at the Museum of the Bible in Washington turn out to be fakes: Experts explain how we know the massive trove of scrolls held in Jerusalem is genuine
A toxic political, economic and healthcare brew led to Italy’s coronavirus disaster. But the U.S. and Israel share many of the same dangerously dysfunctional conditions for an out-of-control outbreak
Archaeological evidence and fossil pollen from around the Mediterranean show villagers in the hills of the Galilee were the first to cultivate olives
Unless he hopped to the hunt, this young adult couldn’t have survived its foot injury without help from the prehistoric community, archaeologists say
Hadrosaur that lived 75 million years ago had cavities and lesions in its vertebrae consistent with Langerhans cell histiocytosis, researchers report
A veterinarian taking a morning swim found what turned out to be an anchor engraved with hieroglyphs on the seafloor. But who defaced the Egyptian goddess?