Archaeologists Explore Secrets of Neolithic Village off Israel’s Coast

UC San Diego archaeologist and Qualcomm Institute (QI) affiliate Thomas Levy and Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel and their teams have completed a combined physical and virtual excavation of a Neolithic underwater settlement off Israel's Carmel coast. The expedition could reveal secrets about prehistoric social evolution, climate and environmental change from more than 8,000 years ago. In accordance with social distancing measures, the UC San Diego team used remote technology developed in QI to join their Israeli collaborators in a three-week excavation of the site from the safety of home. "We had planned to be in the field with Assaf and his team in October, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, we could not travel,' said Levy, director of the Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability at QI and co-director of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology. "The challenge was to find a way for our UC San Diego team to collaborate with our Israeli colleagues in a meaningful and useful way, while stuck in southern California.' The team is currently in the process of using QI's cutting-edge visualization facilities to analyze new artifacts and highly-detailed 3D maps of the site for posterity and sampling sediment to study the ancient environment. Adding new finds to a wealth of knowledge. Science divers led by Yasur-Landau at the University of Haifa's Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies carried out the dig in the surf-zone 30 kilometers south of Haifa.