Bridging Geographical, Academic, and Disciplinary Gaps
Lilach Gonen knows Jerusalem’s roads well. As an undergraduate dual major in archaeology and environmental sciences, she divided her time between Mt. Scopus and the Edmond J. Safra campus – bridging two faculties and traversing the city on a nearly daily basis.
Despite the physical distance, the two fields complemented each other perfectly. As her studies progressed, Lilach grew increasingly interested in how people and cultures change in light of environmental shifts – and realized that the key to answering this question may lie precisely in the overlap.
Today, Lilach is a second-year graduate student, earning her MSc from the Fredy & Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences. Her research, under the supervision of Dr. Yonatan Goldsmith (earth sciences) and Dr. Shlomit Bechar (archaeology), asks whether it is possible to bring archaeology and climate science closer together.
Both archaeological and paleoclimate data sets exist, but correlating the two is challenging, mainly due to chronological uncertainty. In order to better understand the connections between climate and human culture and society in the past, Lilach is examining the possibility of past climate reconstruction directly from within the archaeological record.
She is conducting geo-chemical analysis and isotopic measurements on organic material extracted from soil uncovered at Tel Hazor (one of the most important archaeological sites for the study biblical periods, where she has been excavating the past few years), in hopes of discovering how rainfall amounts changed over the periods represented at the site.
If successful, Lilach’s project will help archaeologists gain a deeper understanding of the climate in which past societies lived and operated, and how changes may have affected them. Specifically in Tel Hazor, given that the site has been excavated since the 1950s, such an understanding would add a rich layer to an already well-studied past society.
“I am developing a new research approach with the hope that it will allow us a better understanding of how past societies reacted to changing climate conditions.”