08/10/2022
Carolina Aznar, Ph.D., co-director of the Southern Plain of Akko Project, returns
to Israel this summer in preparation for fieldwork that will provide opportunities
for SLU-Madrid students.
Aznar, a faculty member in the Theology department at SLU-Madrid, launched the Southern
Plain of Akko Project (SPAP) along with researchers from Universidad Internacional
SEK-Ecuador and the Spanish Biblical and Archeological Institute of Jerusalem over
a decade ago.
Carolina Aznar, Ph.D., at the site of the excavation in 2013. Photo provided by Carolina Aznar.
SPAP’s goal is to understand economic exchanges between the inland and the coastal
Canaanites in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.E.), and between the Phoenicians
and the Israelites in the Iron Age (ca. 1200-586 B.C.E.). The excavation site is near
the lower Kishon River, a fertile area that has been important to agriculture and
trade throughout history.
Aznar has worked in the region since 2010. For five summers, from 2011 through 2014,
she and her team ran an archaeological field school in Tel Regev, providing hands-on
research experience to students from SLU-Madrid and other universities. She returned
to Israel in 2018 to perform a stratigraphy sounding.
The excavation sites have revealed layers of the Ottoman, Early Islamic, Persian and
Iron Age periods. The team discovered …