Thomas E. Levy
Professor of archaeology
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. Levy is co-director of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology and directs the Center for Cyber-archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute UC San Diego research group at the California Center of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
Levy is a field archaeologist with interests in the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, on social evolution from the beginnings of sedentism and the domestication of plants and animals in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (7500 BCE) to the rise of the first historic Levantine state-level societies in the Iron Age (1200 – 500 BCE). He 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.
He has published 10 books and several hundred scholarly articles. Levy edited Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future – The New Pragmatism (London: Equinox Publishers, 2010) that in 2011 won the ‘best scholarly book’ from the Biblical Archaeology Society (Washington, DC).
Honors
Levy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club, Levy won the 2011 Lowell Thomas Award for “Exploring the World’s Greatest Mysteries.” With his wife Alina Levy and the Sthapathy brothers, traditional craftsmen from the village of Swamimalai, he co-authored the book Masters of Fire – Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India. (Bochum: German Mining Museum, 2008).
Publications
Levy, T.E. (ed.) 1987 Shiqmim I—Studies Concerning Chalcolithic Societies in the Northern Negev Desert, Israel (1982–1984), 2 volumes [Part i: Text, Part ii: Figures and Plates].
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q17032777. VIAF identifies the subject as 92754544. The Library of Congress control number is nr88001744. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1200, 2010, 2011 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas E. Levy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.