Jamie Fraser
James (Jamie) Fraser is Dorot Director of the W F Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2016, which was published as the monograph Dolmens in the Levant in 2018 and was awarded the G. Ernest Wright Award for Best Archaeological Publication. Jamie previously served as Curator for the Ancient Levant and Anatolia at the British Museum, where he curated the 2023 exhibition Luxury and power: Persia to Greece. He directs an excavation project in Jordan investigating a Bronze Age olive oil factory at Khirbet Um al-Ghozlan, and has archaeological experience in Jordan, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kashmir, Greece, Cambodia, Australia and the Solomon Islands.
Presenter at
Spring Bible & Archaeology Fest 2025, April 5-6, 2025
The Visible Dead: dolmens in the southern Levant in the 4th Millennium B.C.
Megalithic dolmens are some of the most striking stone-built tome monuments of the ancient Levant. However, their relationship with settlement systems and the physical landscape is poorly understood. This lecture argues for a direct correlation between the distribution of dolmen fields and the spread of late prehistoric settlement sites into previously uninhabited geological zones. During the fourth millennium B.C. (Late Chalcolithic–EB I), settlements shifted from the alluvial fans of the Jordan Valley floor to the lateral wadis of the rift escarpment, where communities could exploit newly domesticated, higher-altitude tree crops. Discrete areas of the escarpment are dominated by microcrystalline sandstone, limestone, and basalt formations that are more conducive to the extraction of megalithic slabs for above-ground tomb construction than to the excavation of traditional subterranean shafts. Dolmens are present near EB I settlements in areas dominated by these formations, and are absent in areas where softer geological strata are found, even if these areas were also settled in the fourth millennium B.C. This model implies that dolmens were not part of a vaguely defined “megalithic phenomenon,” as commonly described, but are better approached contextually as part of a complex mortuary landscape, in which above-ground and subterranean tomb chambers were associated funerary traditions.
