She will present a lecture on the "Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls" on Thursday, February 12, 2015, at 7:00 p.m. at the UAB Alumni House. She is an archaeologist and the First Vice-President of the Archaeological Institute of America. She has published 10 books, including The Archaeology of the Holy Land, and dozens of articles. A reception before the lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. and all are invited to attend. For more information call (205) 934-5634.
From 1992-2002, Magness was Associate/Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in the Departments of Classics and Art History at Tufts University, Medford, MA.She received her BA in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1977), and her PhD in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania (1989). From 1990–92, Magness was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology at the Center for Old World Archaeology and Art at Brown University.
Professor Magness specializes in the archaeology of ancient Palestine (modern Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories) in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods. Her research interests include Jerusalem, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient synagogues, Masada, the Roman army in the East, and ancient pottery.
Many archaeologists wait their entire career for one big find. Jodi Magness is having a spectacular time making discovery after discovery. As she told North Carolina Public Radio, in 2011 she and a team went to Israel to identify a dig location, hoping to find an ancient synagogue. "We didn't actually know that there was a synagogue of this type before we started digging," Magness said. It was a big site and it was overgrown."And really by luck we came down right on the eastern wall of the synagogue in that very first sounding that we made." The 5th century synagogue is located in Huqoq, an ancient Jewish village in Israel's Lower Galilee.
