Citation:
Abstract:
With contributions by Hay Ashkenazi, Eliot Braun, Anna Eirikh-Rose, Rinat Favis, Yosef Garfinkel, David Gersht, Talia Goldman, Jacob Kaplan, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Ofer Marder, Zinovi Matskevich, Danny Rosenberg, Moshe Sade, Haward Smithline, Katharina Streit, Eli Yannai and Dmitry Yegorov
Jacob Kaplan was a dynamic field archaeologist and an original researcher of the Pottery Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in the Levant who was not accepted by the mainstream scholarly community of his time. Today we know that he played an important role in shaping the archaeological sequence of the late prehistory of Israel. His groundbreaking achievement in the early 1950s was the discovery and definition of the Wadi Rabah culture — a major entity in the late Pottery Neolithic period. On a broader scale, Kaplan incorporated the Pottery Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Israel into the sequences of the late prehistory of the Levant and touched, even if indirectly, on the question of the end of the Neolithic period — one of the most intensive, creative and transformative eras in human history.
In Jacob Kaplan's Excavations of Protohistoric Sites 1950s—1980s, the authors present some of Kaplan's unpublished field work. They also offer a broad canvas of the thoughts, theories and considerations that placed Kaplan in the forefront of Israeli archaeology of his time. His views on some of the basic crono-cultural issues of the Pottery Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods endure to this very day. This book accords Kaplan the full recognition he deserves as an original, leading researcher of the late prehistory of Israel.