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Trude Dothan Wins 1991 Percia Schimmel Award

Israel’s most prestigious archaeological prize, the Percia Schimmel Award for Distinguished Contribution to Archaeology in Eretz Israel and the Lands of the Bible, has been bestowed on Professor Trude Dothan. The distinguished honor is presented annually by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The judges for the 1991 award—Professor Ya‘akov Meshorer, Professor Nahman Avigad and Joseph Aviram—cited Dothan’s combination of “erudite scholarship and fieldwork” and particularly noted “her outstanding contribution to the research of the Philistines.”

Dothan is the E. L. Sukenik Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has directed or participated in several of the most important excavations in Israel—including Tell Qasile, Hazor, Deir el-Balah and the ongoing dig at Tel Miqne-Ehkron—and in the major excavation at Athienou, in Cyprus. Early in her professional career, Dothan became aware of the cultural affinity between the countries around the Mediterranean and ancient Israel, and this realization has suffused her work on different aspects of Philistine culture. Her book The Philistines and Their Material Culture (Yale Univ. Press, revised edition, 1982) is a standard reference on the Philistines and other Sea Peoples, as well as on the Early Iron Age in general.