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In Memoriam: Douglas L. Esse

Douglas L. Esse, archaeologist, professor and foremost authority on the Early Bronze Age Levant, died on October 13 at home in Hyde Park, Chicago, after a long battle with stomach cancer. He was 42 years old.

I knew Doug for more than a decade and a half: first as a student at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, then as a colleague in the field and in the classroom, and throughout as a very best friend.

He began his field work in 1975 at Tel Dan and Tel Qiri in Israel and continued to develop as a stratigrapher and strategist in the following year, when he joined our staff at Carthage.^a By the time we launched the Ashkelon project a decade later, where Doug served as associate director and as director of the lab in Jerusalem, he had become one of the very best excavators I have ever known. Few archaeologists could excavate the backfill of robber trenches the way he could and retrieve in negative form so many coherent building plans.