Who we are?
Mission
The Tel Dan Excavation is an interdisciplinary academic program dedicated to the study of Israel’s past through immersive, hands-on research and teaching. This joint project offers a unique educational experience that integrates professional archaeological excavation with lectures, seminars, and guided tours. Designed for participants engaged in cultural studies, archaeology, the ancient Near East, biblical studies, anthropology, and history, the program is set within the exceptional ecological landscape of Tel Dan in the Hula Valley.
Meet the Team
Director of the excavations
Dr. Yifat Thareani
Dr. Yifat Thareani is director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, Hebrew Union College and the director of the archaeology program at NYU Tel Aviv. She is a graduate post-doc at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Paris, at the Orient et Méditerranée, Laboratoire Mondes Sémitiques, Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a graduate post-doc of the Leon-Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, University of Haifa. She completed her BA, MA and PhD in Archaeology at Tel-Aviv University. Thareani has supervised excavation fields at Beth-Shemesh, and co-directed the Israeli-French archaeological mission at Achziv.
Associate Director of Excavations and Staff Zooarchaeologist
Dr. Jonathan S. Greer
Dr. Jonathan Greer (Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University) is an archaeologist and biblical scholar with research interests in ancient Israelite religion, sacrifice, and feasting. He is Visiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University and has published a number of works on the relationship of the Bible to the ancient world.
Research Associate
Prof. Mark Schwartz
Prof. Mark Schwartz, Professor of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University, received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University. His research focused on trade between the early city-states of Mesopotamia and the emerging complex societies of Anatolia in the fourth millennium B.C. He has worked on various excavations in the Middle East. As assistant director of the Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological in Diyarbakir, Turkey he involved students in research and is currently working on the final publication of the excavations. At present he is involved in inter-departmental collaborative work using ROVs to study shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. At Grand Valley, he teaches courses on the archaeology of the Near East as well as general courses concerning anthropology and archaeology.
Research Associate
Prof. Elizabeth R. Arnold
Elizabeth R. Arnold is an associate professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA. She is an environmental archaeologist specializing in zooarchaeology and isotope analyses and has collaborated on projects in Canada, the United States, Sudan, South Africa. Her research in Israel focuses on how human cultural behavior both affects and is affected by the natural environment in the Early Bronze Age and the Iron Age periods.
Director of the Pre-Excavation Jerusalem Study Program
Prof. Jason Kalman
Prof. Jason Kalman is Associate Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature and Interpretation and the Gottschalk-Slade Chair in Jewish Intellectual History at the Cincinnati School of HUC-JIR. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University and is research fellow affiliated with the University of the Free State, South Africa. He also holds a degree in education and MA from McGill. He specializes in the history of Jewish biblical exegesis and his specific research interests include Dead Sea Scrolls reception history, rabbinic anti-Christian polemic, medieval intellectual history as reflected in biblical commentary, and biblical interpretation after the Holocaust.
Director of the Lithic Research Laboratory
Dr. Andrea Squitieri
Dr. Andrea Squitieri studied Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at the University of Turin and at University College London (PhD 2015).
He participated in several excavations in the Middle East and he collaborated with several projects for the study of stone tools.
He worked between 2015 and 2025 at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Heidelberg, and since 2025 he is assistant professor at the University of Padova.
His research focuses on Iron Age archaeology, the Assyrian Empire and stone tool technology.