BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

The Boomer Archaeologist

Thomas Levy reflects on a career of exploration and discovery

The Boomer Archaeologist: A Graphic Memoir of Tribes, Identity, and the Holy Land

By Thomas Evan Levy, illustrated by Lily Almeida
(Sheffield: Equinox, 2025), 408 pp. / $39.95

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Acclaimed archaeologist Thomas Levy’s new autobiographical graphic memoir, The Boomer Archaeologist, follows Levy from his childhood to recent retirement, tracing his path from globe-trotting archaeologist to tenured professor at the University of California, San Diego. The memoir—told through quirky, comic book-like illustrations—recounts Levy’s life and career during a series of imagined phone conversations between Levy and the book’s illustrator, Levy’s niece and U.K.-based artist, Lily Almeida.

As the book’s title makes clear, Levy is part of the “boomer” generation that came of age when the “American Dream” promised citizens they could rise to the pinnacle of their chosen professions and pursuits. His Jewish identity also weaves its way through the memoir: his values learned from his family, which left Russia because of anti-Jewish pogroms, his service in the Israel Defense Forces, and his marriage to a woman of South Asian descent who converted to Judaism. (The book’s postscript also takes on recent anti-Semitism in the U.S., which Levy sees as an unfortunate harbinger of societal collapse.)

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The memoir goes on to document the many transitions that have characterized Levy’s professional journey. He began his career studying the very ancient human past, the Chalcolithic period (literally, the “Copper-Stone” age [c. 4500–3300 BCE]), during which metals were first mined and exploited. Fellow archaeologists have long recognized Levy as a leading expert on early copper production and metallurgy. Levy earned this reputation from his work at Khirbat en-Nahas (located in Wadi Faynan in present-day southern Jordan), site of the largest copper mining and smelting installation in the ancient world.

Levy’s early interests also focused on anthropological archaeology (especially ethnoarchaeology), an examination of the past through the lens of ancient and more recent socio-economic conditions in traditional societies. In later years, Levy embraced “cyber-archaeology,” especially the use of digital methods and techniques to record and preserve threatened archaeological sites in conflict zones.

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Interestingly, the memoir goes into less detail about some of Levy’s other key contributions to the field. For example, Levy’s team at Khirbat en-Nahas uncovered a possible tenth-century BCE Edomite connection to King Solomon, which has since served as a counter-weight to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein’s dismissal of a substantial Israelite kingdom during the time of the United Monarchy.

Second, while excavating in Israel at the site of Lahav (possibly biblical Ziklag), Levy recovered a pottery sherd inscribed with the name of the Egyptian king Narmer. Narmer’s reign began at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, and most scholars consider him the unifier of Egypt and the founder of the First Dynasty.

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More recently, another breakthrough came near the coastal city of Dor in northern Israel, where Levy and his colleagues in marine archaeology recorded evidence of the oldest tsunami in the eastern Mediterranean, dating to the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (c. 9700–6750 BCE).

Although the book is an autobiography that paints a flattering picture of its subject, it will certainly appeal to both “boomers” and archaeology enthusiasts who enjoy learning about the inventive, successful, and risk-taking pioneers who have shaped the modern field of biblical archaeology.

Donald Kane is Chair of the Biblical Archaeology Forum (BAF), President of the Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia (BASONOVA), and Trustee of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.