Yosef Garfinkel (Hebrew: יוסף גרפינקל; born 1956) is an Israeli archaeologist and academic. He is a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology and of Archaeology of the Biblical Period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Biography Yosef Garfinkel was born in 1956 in Haifa, Israel. He served in the Israel Defense Forces between 1975 and 1978. He studied at Hebrew University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in geography and archaeology in 1981, a Master of Arts (MA) degree in prehistory and biblical archaeology in 1987, and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1991. Garfinkel spent a Post-Doc year during 1992 at the Department of Anthropology and the Semitic Museum of Harvard University.
Since 1993 has taught at the Department of Biblical Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his years at the Institute of Archaeology and till 2026 he guided 21 M.A thesis and 17 PhD dissertations.
Over the years Garfinkel was appointed Research Fellow at the Centre de Recherche Français a Jérusalem (1987–92) [fr] and at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (1985–93). He was a visiting scholar at Yale University (Fall 1995), Oxford University (Wolfson College and the Ashmolean Museum) and Cambridge University (the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (2000)) and King's College London (2017).
He was the curator of the museum of Yarmukian Culture at Kibbutz Sha'ar HaGolan (1993–2023). Since 2021 he has edited the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology (JJAR).
Research contribution Garfinkel academic activities concentrate on three major fields: protohistory of the Near East, archaeology of the Iron Age in the Kingdom of Judah and the history of dance. He has authored 35 books and over 200 articles on ancient architecture, farming, water sources, pottery, art, religion and dance.
In 2007, he began conducting excavations at the fortified city of Khirbet Qeiyafa. This site is dated to the early 10th century BC, the period of the biblical King David. In the 2008 season an inscription was discovered written in ink on a pottery shard in a script which is probably Early Alphabetic/Proto Phoenician. Cited in This might be the earliest Hebrew inscription ever found, although the actual language of the inscription is still under debate.
Protohistory of the Near East In the first half of his academic career, Garfinkel specialized in the protohistoric era of the Near East, when the world's earliest village communities were established and the beginning of agriculture took place.
He has excavated sites dating to the full sequence of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods at Yiftahel (1983–85), Gesher (1986–1987), Tel 'Ali (1989–1990, Sha'ar HaGolan (1898–1990, 1996–2004), Neolithic Ashkelon (1998–1999), Meitar (1998–1999), and Tel Tsaf (2004-2007).
In the 1960s-70s the Neolithic period was considered as composed from egalitarian communities. Garfinkel analysis of the plastered floors from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites of Yiftahel and 'Ain Ghazal indicated the existence of hierarchical order. In the same way, the analysis of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A settlement around Jericho revealed spatial complexity and settlement planning: a central site with a tower and a peripheral wall, and large assemblage of exotic artifacts made from obsidian, basalt and green stones. Smaller settlements around Jericho do not present such activities. Likewise, Pottery Neolithic period was long considered by leading scholars as an era of decline. However, Garfinkel's analysis of the Yarmukian settlement at Sha'ar Hagolan revealed settlement growth, including a 20-hectare village with large courtyard buildings of 350 and 700 sq.m. used by extended families, network of streets, a well for water, and hundreds of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines.Ben-Michael, Judith. "The Story of the Ceramic Industry in the Southern Levant." In From Sha'ar Hagolan to Shaaraim: Essays in Honor of Prof. Yosef Garfinkel, edited by Saar Ganor, Igor Kreimerman, Katharina Streit, and Madeleine Mumcuoglu, 1–18. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2016.Y. Garfinkel, D. Ben-Shlomo and N. Marom 2012. Sha'ar Hagolan: A Major Pottery Neolithic Settlement and Artistic Center in the Jordan Valley. Euroasian Prehistory 8, pp. 97–143.
Garfinkel is credited with defining the Middle Chalcolithic period.Braun, Eliot. "Deconstructing Y. Garfinkel's "Beth Shean Ware" and "Middle Chalcolithic": A Realistic look at two archaeological Chimeras." Journal of the Serbian Archaeological Society 24 (2008): 81-108.Rowan, Yorke M., and Jonathan Golden. "The Chalcolithic period of the Southern Levant: a synthetic review." Journal of World Prehistory 22, no. 1 (2009): 1-92. (p. 8) Garfinkel used Tel Tsaf as the period site for the Middle Chalcolithic, with courtyard buildings of nuclear families. Each building contained large tower silos, with a storage capacity of 10-30 ton per household, a grain surplus never before seen in the ancient Near East.Y. Garfinkel, D. Ben-Shlomo and T. Kuperman 2009. Large-scale Storage of Grain Surplus in the Sixth Millennium BC: The Silos of Tel Tsaf. Antiquity 83, pp. 309–325. This richness enabled the inhabited of Tel Tsaf to acquired exotic artifacts through long-distance trade networks, like Ubaid pottery from Mesopotamia, a copper awl from the Balkans?, beads from Ethiopia and seals from the Red Sea and the Nile.Dag, D. O. R. O. N., and Y. O. S. E. F. Garfinkel. "The flint industry of Tel Tsaf, a middle Chalcolithic site in the Jordan valley, Israel." Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society 37 (2007): 381-417. Garfinkel research on the art and symbolic expression of the Proto-historic Near East. His analysis of Proto-historic iconographic representations from the entire Near east concentrated on dancing figures, gender aspects, birds, and flowers. More recently, Garfinkel discovered arithmatic logic in Halifian floral decorations of from ancient Mesopotamia, which he considered the earliest vegital depictions in history. The petals came arranged in the numbers 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. This presents a prehistoric mathematical system, predating the Sumerian mathematical system based on the number six.Y. Garfinkel and S. Krulwich 2025. The Earliest Vegetal Motifs in Prehistoric Art: Painted Halafian Pottery of Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking. Journal of World Prehistory 38: This research garnered international attention and was reported, for example by Nature and CNN.
History of dance Dance history has focused mainly on periods such as the Baroque and Renaissance, with only limited attention to ancient Greece, Egypt, and prehistory. Garfinkel highlighted prehistoric dance, and later systematic research identified more than 500 Neolithic dance scenes dating back 9,000–7,000 years, around the start of agriculture. These scenes seem to depict calendrical rituals linked to seasonal farming activity. The research has drawn significant attention, including coverage in the New York Times.
Later, Garfinkel dealt with dance scenes from the Upper Paleolithic in Europe dating 40,000 years ago.Y. Garfinkel 2010. Dance in Prehistoric Europe. Documenta Praehistorica 37, pp. 205–214. He later refined a five-stage model was proposed to describe the evolution of human dance, which started hundreds of thousands of years ago courtship, rites of passage, trance, calendrical ceremonies, and the professional dancing.Y. Garfinkel 2018. The Evolution of Human Dance: Courtship, Rites of Passage, Trance, Calendrical Ceremonies, and the Professional Dancer. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28, pp. 283–298.
Archaeology of the Iron Age in the Kingdom of Judah In the second half of his academic career Garfinkel specialized in the archaeology of the Kingdom of Judah, but he also conducted a small text excavation at Area K in Hazor (2019). His regional project in the Shephelah, southwest of Jerusalem, included excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa (2007–2013), Khirbet al-Ra'i (2015–2021), Tel Lachish (2013–2017, 2022–2025) and a survey at Tel Socoh (2010). He also conducted excavation in the eastern part of the Ophel of Jerusalem (2025). Recently Garfinkel summarized the results of his research in a comprehensive book titled The Archaeology of the Kingdom of Judah. Atlanta.
Canaanite and Israelite Iconography. Over the years, Garfinkel engaged in iconographic studies of finds from the Bronze and Iron Ages. He published and analyzed objects held by life-size statues that were found in Canaanite temples, at Megiddo and Lachish, providing rare evidence that large anthropomorphic statues were indeed worshipped in temples.Y. Garfinkel 2025. Life-Sized Statues in the Ancient Near East: The Case Study of the Warrior God of Early Bronze Age I Megiddo. Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 6, pp. 1–13.Y. Garfinkel 2020. Scepters of Life-Size Divine Statues from Canaanite Lachish and Hazor. Antiquity 94 (375), pp. 669–685. He further explored ancient Near Eastern soundscapes, focusing on forgotten bronze bells from Megiddo and Assyria.Y. Garfinkel 2025. For Whom the Bell Tolls: Horse Harnesses at Megiddo and Beyond. In B. Sass and L. Battini (eds.) Mortals, Deities and Divine Symbols: Rethinking Ancient Imagery from the Levant to Mesopotamia. Studies offered to Tallay Ornan, pp. 465–476. Bicester: Archaeopress.
The High Chronology of the Israelite Kingdoms Beginning in the 1980s, scholars like Israel Finkelstein published numerous books and hundreds of articles, in which they argued against the historicity of the earlier periods of the Deuteronomic tradition, and especially the traditions about the 10th-9th centuries BC. Proponents of this new chronology, called the Low Chronology, dated state formation to the 9th century, refuting the historicity of David, Solomon, the construction of Solomon Temple, and Rehoboam's fortifications recorded in the bible.Finkelstein, Israel. "A Low Chronology Update." The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating (2014): 31.