Giv'at Kipod

Giv’at Kipod is located in the western fringes of the Jezreel Valley in the Manasseh Hills. On the eastern slope of the hill, a basanite bifacial tool workshop was identified. The site is characterized the large piles of debitage as well as few finished products. Based on a geochemical study conducted with T. Gluhak from the University of Mainz that compered the chemical properties of basanite in the quarry with that of archaeological bifacial tools, it seems that the quarry was exploited for an extended period of time from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and through the Early Chalcolithic.

Relevant publications

Shimelmitz, R., Rosenberg, D., and Nativ, A. 2005. Giv’at Kipod: A Basalt quarry and a workshop for the production of bifacial tools in the Manasseh Hills, Israel. Neo-Lithics 1/05: 9–12.
Rosenberg, D., Shimelmitz, R., and Nativ, A. 2008. Basalt bifacial tool production in the southern Levant: A glance at the quarry and workshop site of Giv’at Kipod, Israel. Antiquity 82(316): 367–376.

Rosenberg, D., and Shimelmitz, R. 2010. Giv’at Kipod – A basalt quarry and a workshop for the production of bifacial tools in Israel. The Quarry 5: 7–14.

Gluhak, T. and Rosenberg, D. 2013. Geochemical discrimination of basaltic sources as a tool for province analyses of bifacial tools in the southern Levant: First results from the Jezreel Valley, Israel. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(3): 1611–1622.

Rosenberg, D., and Gluhak, T. 2016. Trade me an axe? Interpretive challenges of the distribution and provenance of Neolithic basaltic bifacial tools in Israel. Antiquity 90(349): 48–63.

Shimelmitz, R., and Rosenberg, D. 2016. The organization of basanite bifacial production at Giv’at Kipod Quarry, Israel: Towards an ‘Alyawara Day’ model of extraction. Journal of Lithic Studies 3(3): 499–521.