International scientific panel
Thomas Evan Levy
Member of the International Scientific council of Social Sciences
Thomas Evan Levy is Distinguished Professor and holds the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Department of Anthropology and Jewish Studies Program, and is director of the Center for Cyber-archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute, California Center of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego and was recently appointed co-director of the new Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at UC San Diego. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Levy is a Levantine field archaeologist with interests in the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, on social evolution from the beginnings of sendentism and the domestication of plants and animals in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 7500 BCE) to the rise of the first historic Levantine state level societies in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 500 BCE). A Fellow of the Explorers Club, Levy won the 2011 Lowell Thomas Award for “Exploring the World’s Greatest Mysteries.” Levy has been the principal investigator of many interdisciplinary archaeological field projects in Israel and Jordan that have been funded by the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and other organizations. Tom also conducts ethnoarchaeological research in India. Levy, his wife Alina Levy (who is here today) and the Sthapathy traditional craftsmen from the village of Swamimalai co-authored the book Masters of Fire - Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India. Tom has published 16 books and several hundred scholarly articles in high impact journals, conference proceedings and more. Levy and his colleague Mohammad Najjar won Biblical Archaeology Review’s ‘Best BAR Article’ for “Condemned to the Mines: Copper Production & Christian Persecution.” His most recent books are published with Springer academic press and include Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective – Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience (2015), Heritage and Archaeology in the Digital Age: Acquisition, Curation, and Dissemination of Spatial Cultural Heritage Data (2017), and Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives: Digital Technology and Deep-Time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East (2018). Tom was Co-PI on the 5-year NSF IGEERT $3.2 million grant entitled “ Training, Research and Education in Engineering for Cultural Heritage Diagnostics (TEECH). Prof. Levy also served as PI for the 2-year University of California Office of the President Catalyst grant ($1.07 million) from 2016 – 2018 that focused on At-Risk World Heritage and the Digital Humanities. Prof. Levy recently completed a 3-year term as Chair of the Committee on Archaeological Policy (CAP) of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), is a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and an adjunct professor at the University of Cyprus. After spending 40 years of research in the deserts of the Middle East, he is now engaged in Marine Archaeology research. In 2016 Tom was the PI of the Kastrouli – Antikyra Bay, Greece Mycenaean Land and Sea Project in Greece with the University of the Aegean. This involved a terrestrial excavation of a Late Bronze Age prestige tomb, scuba diving and sub-surface coring of marine sediments to investigate the collapse of Mycenaean civilization around 1200 BC. In summary, Professor Levy is being awarded the prestigious doctor of philosophical sciences, honors causa at Charles University in the Czech Republic for his innovative scholarship in social archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and cyber-archaeology.