Inside BAR

David Ussishkin is the author of this month’s cover story, “Answers at Lachish.” In this important and full-scale report, Ussishkin, as Director of the Lachish Excavations Project, lays out the archaeological history of the site and comes up with crucial new conclusions about which strata on the tell should be associated with the Assyrian destruction of Lachish in 701 B.C. His findings have far-reaching implications for the dating of other sites and for dating the common but otherwise enigmatic l’melekh stamp impressions on pottery handles.

Since 1973, Director of the on-going excavations at Lachish, Ussishkin is head of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He spent last year lecturing at the University of Toronto in Canada and serving as Visiting Curator in The Royal Ontario Museum. Much of last year’s research time was spent pulling together many of the conclusions he reaches in “Answers.”

Ussishkin is also the Editor of Tel Aviv, the journal of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology, and a long-standing member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board.