FOA Webinar: Shua Kisilevitz

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Regan Baker

FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS

Holier than Thou? The Temples at Tel Moza and Reflections of Ritual Practices in Ancient Judah

Friends of ASOR present the first webinar of the 2025-2026 season on September 10, 2025, at 12:30 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Shua Kisilevitz. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

The recent discovery of not one, but a succession of two temples from the First Temple period at Tel Moza—just 7 km from Jerusalem—has reignited debate about how religion took shape in ancient Judah and the wider region. The revelations at Tel Moza are especially intriguing when set against the backdrop of traditional scholarship, which was both heavily guided by biblical texts and paradigms and hampered by the rarity of confirmed temple remains in Judah.

3D reconstruction © Roy Albag. Reproduced with permission. This image is not included under the website’s general Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced or distributed without express permission of the copyright holder.

At Tel Moza, excavations revealed a cultic precinct containing a modest early shrine that was later replaced by a monumental “long-room” temple whose plan, scale, and decoration closely echo the Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple. Indeed, the similarities between the temples at Tel Moza and Jerusalem, and the proximity between the two, sharpen questions of cultic centralization, reform, and practice, and they suggest that Jerusalem’s temple was neither the only one in Judah nor necessarily the “first.”

Because such temple evidence is so scarce in Judah, the Tel Moza finds are unusually revealing. They include altars, offering tables, standing stones, sacrificial remains, and cultic paraphernalia that were found in sealed, well-documented contexts that reflect continuous rebuilding and refurbishing of the temples. Altogether, these discoveries provide a rare glimpse into how worship was actually practiced and how traditions formed over centuries. In this lecture, Dr. Kisilevitz will trace the development of the two Tel Moza temples and the rituals practiced there, setting them alongside biblical descriptions and regional parallels. Through plans, objects, and visual reconstructions, she will show how the patterns at Tel Moza likely reflect broader traditions that shaped religious life in Jerusalem and across the southern Levant.

Shua Kisilevitz is Assistant Director of the Albright Institute and a research fellow at Tel Aviv University.
She received her B.A.and M.A. in Archaeology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Tel Aviv University. She has participated in excavations across Israel and has directed excavations at 15 sites in the region of Jerusalem and Judea. Since 2012, she has spearheaded the research and publication of the Iron Age site at Tel Moza, and she is co-director of the Tel Moza Expedition Project. Dr. Kisilevitz specializes in the archaeology of religion and ritual of the southern Levant in the Iron Age.

SUPPORT THE WEBINAR PROGRAM!

Friends of ASOR is pleased to announce that the first webinars of the 2025-2026 season will once again be free and open to the public with a goal to raise $10,000 so that the entire webinar season will be free. Will you support this outreach effort with a tax-deductible contribution? All donors/sponsors with gifts of $100 or more will be recognized in subsequent webinars. Help ensure these webinars stay free and available to all by donating today!

Designate your gift for “Webinars” in the drop-down menu.

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Fieldwork Report: Anjuli Latchmansingh

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Moni Islam

All That Remains at Çadır Höyük

Anjuli Latchmansingh, 2025 Strange-Midkiff Families Fieldwork Scholarship Recipient

Within the village of Peynir Yemez in Türkiye is an archaeological excavation site named Çadır Höyük – an artificial mound that boasts roughly 7,000 years of human history. Evidence of human occupation on the mound comes in many forms. From pottery sherds, burials, and stone walls to glass beads and lithics, this site was once full of human activity. Yet the mound was populated by more than just homo sapiens. Animals of a wide variety were present, and their bones help tell us the human story.

During the summer of 2025, I had the privilege of working at Çadır Höyük with Dr. Sharon R. Steadman (my professor, advisor, and the Project Director of Çadır Höyük) and a wonderful team of specialists, professors, researchers, students, and Turks for about six weeks. We worked six days a week and had Thursdays off – although many of us still found ourselves seated at our lab stations attempting to make the most of our fleeting time there. The days were long and hot. I spent my mornings in the field excavating and my afternoons in the lab analyzing faunal remains. For the season, I would be working by myself with faunal remains. I had spent the beginning of the year teaching myself about animal anatomy and specifically researching the species of animals that have been previously recorded at the site in preparation for this project.

Excavating at Çadır Höyük was a unique experience. I was there with three other students from SUNY Cortland, and we were some of the first people to arrive. We opened many of the trenches for the season and I learned a great many skills and techniques. For instance, we took elevations from the trenches using an auto level on a tripod with a level rod and we learned to avoid bug bites by tucking our pants into our socks. Sometimes, it was the not-so-technical training that would prove most useful. There were, in fact, a lot of large bugs and spiders.

Not long after arriving at the site, a database and its recording protocol was sent to me created by Dr. Benjamin Arbuckle who published several works regarding faunal analyses at Çadır Höyük. Dr. Arbuckle has been an integral part of the project as the Assistant Director since 2009. His publications and the recording sheets he sent were extremely helpfulbecause I did not even know where to start or what to look for in terms of documenting. My education has been solely focused on human bones – identifying, classifying, measuring, determining pathology and trauma, and so forth. This summer, I excavated and evaluated hundreds of bones, but the vast majority of them were from animals. The exciting thing about animal bones is that not only are they all so incredibly different from kingdoms down to specific species, but even within species so much variation still exists. I honestly do not know how zooarchaeologists are able to store all thatinformation in their heads. It is quite impressive! Taking on Dr. Arbuckle’s database was challenging, important work for which I have great respect.

Animal bones differ from human bones in many ways. To give you an idea, animals tend to have many of the same bones that humans have but the shapes of those bones vary. This is in part because some become fused together, like a radius and ulna. Also, some animal bones are more curved or twisted because their muscles attach differently. Bird bones are mostly hollow, making them light enough to take flight. There are caudal vertebrae which make up animal tails, phalanges of hoofed animals, tusks, and a wide array of tooth types. Then there are horns or antlers or carapaces and plastrons to consider – because when you study the nonliving EVERY remnant is an important clue. All these unique traits are actually little hints that zooarchaeologists find and put together to create a complete picture of the animals that were present.

Identifying the animal is only the first step. From this information, we can find MNI, NISP, look for age, sex, signs of trauma, and pathology. Then we can infer much more, such as butchering methods, husbandry, and timelines of domestication and agriculture. All of this informs archaeologists of the people of the past. Much of my time in the lab was spent interpreting the remains and recording the data. Despite my best efforts, there are still a lot of bones to be identified and recorded. So, next summer, the work will continue.

From beginning to end, I had the opportunity to work with a wide range of people from all over the world, each driven bydifferent motivations. All had gravitated to this same small spot on our planet to come together for a season in a small village in central Türkiye to dig. And though I hope to meet and network with many of these professionals in the future, the Turkish people hold a special place in my heart. My time in Peynir Yemez was certainly a unique experience and I will cherish the friends and memories I have made. I will take with me the lessons I learned both in the field and the lab and use them in my next excavation experience. Understanding animal remains and being able to identify them will prove useful in my future endeavors by allowing me to understand relationships between persons and pets and sacrifices. It is my hope that the work I completed at the site proves useful in the future. I am grateful to have played a part in the research at ÇadırHöyük in the summer of 2025.

Want to help more students and early career archaeologists get into the field? Donate to the cause today by selecting “Fieldwork Scholarships” as your gift purpose!