| Founder(s) | Robert Mond |
|---|---|
| Established | 1919 |
| Director | Toufic Haddad |
| Formerly called | British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem |
| Location | , |
| Coordinates | 31°47′35″N35°13′53″E / 31.79295°N 35.23138°E |
| Website | cbrl |
The Kenyon Institute, previously known as the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem (BSAJ), is a British research institute supporting humanities and social science studies in Israel and Palestine. It is part of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and is supported by the British Academy. [1] [2]
The institute was established in 1919 as the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ). The London-based Palestine Exploration Fund was instrumental in its foundation.
The first Director was British archaeologist John Garstang, and among its earliest students was architect-archaeologist George Horsfield, later Chief Inspector of Antiquities in British Mandate Transjordan. An excavation at Tughbah Caves by BSAJ student Francis Turville-Petre in 1925 yielded an important prehistoric find, the Galilee skull. [3] Under Garstang's directorship, the BSAJ began excavations on Mount Ophel, Jerusalem, with the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Garstang resigned his post as Director of the BSAJ in 1926 and British archaeologist John Winter Crowfoot, who had trained at the British School at Athens, became the School's second Director. With his wife, Molly Crowfoot, a noted expert in textiles, crafts and botany, John Crowfoot conducted excavations at Mount Ophel, Jerusalem (1927–1929), Jerash (1928–1930) and Samaria (1930–1935). [4] Dorothy Garrod, who excavated at Mount Carmel as a BSAJ student in 1929 along with Mary Kitson-Clark and Elinor Ewbank, produced evidence of the Natufian culture. [5]
The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem had close ties to the American Schools of Oriental Research, led by archaeologist William Foxwell Albright, and the French École Biblique, through the Reverend Fathers Luis-Hughes Vincent, Antoine Raphael Savignac and Félix-Marie Abel. [6] [7]
In 1998 the BSAJ merged with the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History to form the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and in 2001 was renamed the Kenyon Institute, after Kathleen Kenyon, to reflect the wider range of disciplines supported by the institute as part of the CBRL. [8]
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Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.
The City of David, known locally mostly as Wadi Hilweh, is the name given to an archaeological site considered by most scholars to be the original settlement core of Jerusalem during the Bronze and Iron Ages. It is situated on southern part of the eastern ridge of ancient Jerusalem, west of the Kidron Valley and east of the Tyropoeon Valley, to the immediate south of the Temple Mount.
The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society based in London. It was founded in 1865, shortly after the completion of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem by Royal Engineers of the War Department. The Fund is the oldest known organization in the world created specifically for the study of the Levant region, also known as Palestine. Often simply known as the PEF, its initial objective was to carry out surveys of the topography and ethnography of Ottoman Palestine – producing the PEF Survey of Palestine. Its remit was considered to fall between an expeditionary survey and military intelligence gathering. There was also strong religious interest from Christians; William Thomson, Archbishop of York, was the first President of the PEF.
John Garstang was a British archaeologist of the Ancient Near East, especially Egypt, Sudan, Anatolia and the southern Levant. He was the younger brother of Professor Walter Garstang, FRS, a marine biologist and zoologist. Garstang is considered a pioneer in the development of scientific practices in archaeology as he kept detailed records of his excavations with extensive photographic records, which was a comparatively rare practice in early 20th-century archaeology.
Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister was an Irish archaeologist.
Francis Adrian Joseph Turville-Petre was a British archaeologist, famous for the discovery of the Homo heidelbergensis fossil Galilee Man in 1926, and for his work at Mount Carmel, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel. He was a close friend of Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden.
Sebastia is a Palestinian village of about 3,205 inhabitants, located in the Nablus Governorate of the State of Palestine, some 12 kilometers northwest of the city of Nablus.
Claude Reignier Conder was an English soldier, explorer and antiquarian. He was a great-great-grandson of Louis-François Roubiliac and grandson of editor and author Josiah Conder.
Samaria was the capital city of the Kingdom of Israel between c. 880 BCE and c. 720 BCE. It is the namesake of Samaria, a historical region bounded by Judea to the south and by Galilee to the north. After the Assyrian conquest of Israel, Samaria was annexed by the Neo-Assyrian Empire and continued as an administrative centre. It retained this status in the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Achaemenid Persian Empire before being destroyed during the Wars of Alexander the Great. Later, under the hegemony of the Roman Republic and the subsequent Roman Empire, the city was rebuilt and expanded by the Jewish king Herod the Great, who also fortified it and renamed it "Sebastia" in honour of the Roman emperor Augustus.
Wadi Sallah is a branch of the Wadi Fa'rah where a small cave is located in the Palestinian Tubas Governorate in the northeastern West Bank, located five kilometers southwest of Tubas. The cave was discovered and excavated by Francis Turville-Petre between 1925 and 1926. It contained an occupational Heavy Neolithic archaeological site of the Qaraoun culture. This culture was without pottery and typically used large axes for chopping lumber, cutting wood and felling trees such as the cedars of Lebanon in preparation for the domestication of emmer wheat and the Neolithic Revolution. Levels II and III of Turville-Petre's excavations revealed deposits of flints and potsherds. The pottery was later in date that the Heavy Neolithic material, which included heavy blades, massive flake scrapers, and pieces with denticulation, all similar to those found at Shemouniyeh and Wadi Fa'rah. Several arrowheads were also found that were pressure flaked, generally tanged and leaf-shaped. One of these was of the Amuq 2 type.
Grace Mary Crowfoot was a British archaeologist and a pioneer in the study of archaeological textiles. During a long and active life Molly—as she was always known to friends, family and close colleagues—worked on a wide variety of textiles from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the British Isles. Returning to England in the mid-1930s after more than three decades spent in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, Crowfoot co-authored a 1942 article on the "Tunic of Tutankhamun" and published short reports about textiles from the nearby Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (1951-1952) in Suffolk.
Olga Tufnell was a British archaeologist who assisted on the excavation of the ancient city of Lachish in the 1930s. She had no formal training in archaeology, but had worked as a secretary for Flinders Petrie for a number of years before being given a field assignment. Olga then went on to join James Leslie Starkey in the expedition to find Lachish in 1929 and remained part of the team for the following seasons.
The British Institute in Amman, formerly known as the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History (BIAAH), is a research institute in Amman, Jordan. It is part of the Council for British Research in the Levant. The BIA's patron is Prince Hassan bin Talal and its current director is Carol Palmer.
The Department of Antiquities was a department of the British administration of Mandatory Palestine from 1920 to 1948 that was in charge of the protection and investigation of archaeological remains and artefacts in Palestine.
John Winter Crowfoot CBE was a British educational administrator and archaeologist. He worked for 25 years in Egypt and Sudan, serving from 1914 to 1926 as Director of Education in the Sudan, before accepting an invitation to become Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.
Louis-Hugues Vincent was a French archaeologist, friar of the Dominican Order, who was educated at Jerusalem's École Biblique. He undertook important archaeological research in Palestine (region), primarily during the Mandatory Palestine period.
Joan Crowfoot Payne was a British archaeologist specialising in the study of lithics from the Ancient Near East and worked as Cataloguer of the Ancient Egyptian collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Amara Thornton is a historian of archaeology. Her work focuses on British archaeologists in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She situates archaeology within its broader historical context, including the history of tourism, the history of publishing and popular media, the history of education, government policies and women's history. She is an Honorary Research Associate at UCL.
Alexis Mallon (1875–1934), more commonly known as Père Mallon, was a French Jesuit priest and archaeologist. He founded the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and made important early contributions to the study of the prehistory of the Levant with his excavations at Teleilat el Ghassul (1929–1934).
British School of Archaeology may refer to some of the British International Research Institutes supported by the British Academy, of which now there are eight:
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