Inside BAR

Was the ancient Negev “a kind of Paradise Lost situated between the granaries of plenty known as Egypt and the country ‘flowing with milk and honey’ called Canaan?” American archaeologist Nelson Glueck of Hebrew Union College asked this question more than 30 years ago when he began to explore the Negev desert. In the mid-1970’s, armed with new questions—and new, anthropological perspectives—Thomas E. Levy began a systematic survey of the major drainage system of the northern Negev. “How Ancient Man First Utilized Rivers in the Desert” tells of the remarkable discoveries made by that large-scale survey.

Levy was born in California and began his world-wide archaeological career at Indian sites in the American Southwest and at Tel Gezer in Israel in 1971. He recently resumed from an ethnoarchaeological project in northern Cameroon, where he studied recently abandoned Shuwa Arab pastoral nomad camps south of Lake Chad. After taking his B.A. degree in anthropology at the University of Arizona, Levy went on to get a Ph.D. in archaeology and prehistory at the University of Sheffield in England. Since then he has worked as a curator at the Negev Museum in Beer-Sheva and as assistant director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He currently serves as the assistant director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at the Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem.