Simon Gibson

Shimon Gibson

Dr Shimon Gibson is a British-born archaeologist who has been working in the Holy Land for the past forty years. He was appointed in 2017 as Professor of Practice in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Gibson undertook his academic studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where he completed in 1995 his PhD on Landscape Archaeology in the southern Levant. From 1995 to 2017, he was a Senior Associate Fellow at the American W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Between 1996 and 1999, Gibson served as Assistant Director of the Excavations and Surveys Department in the Israel Antiquities Authority. From 2000-2017 he headed the Archaeology Department of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem. He was a Visiting Professor at UNC Charlotte from 2016-2017.

During the past twenty years Gibson conducted numerous archaeological excavation projects and field surveys in different parts of Israel/Palestine, including the southern desert region. His principal research interests are: Landscape Archaeology; History of Archaeology; History and Archaeology of Jerusalem; early Judaism and early Christianity; History of Photography in the Middle East. Gibson has directed excavations at Sataf, Modi’in, Suba, and in Jerusalem. He is currently co-directing excavations on Mount Zion.

Gibson is the author of more than one hundred research articles on a variety of subjects and spanning different archaeological periods (Chalcolithic to Ottoman), and for more than two decades he served as the Chief Editor of the archaeological journal Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society published in London (now renamed Strata). He is the co-author of two scientific monographs on the antiquities of Jerusalem (on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and another on the Temple Mount), and has co-edited the Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land (2000) and The Illustrated Dictionary and Concordance of the Bible (2005). His book of nineteenth-century photographs of Jerusalem (Jerusalem in Original Photographs) was published in 2003. A popular book on his archaeological work at Suba entitled The Cave of John the Baptist was published in 2004 (Random House, London). He also published a book entitled Flights into Biblical Archaeology (2007) (Albatross, Herziliya). His book The Final Days of Jesus: the Archaeological Evidence (2009) was published by HarperOne in the States; it has been translated into nine languages. His book Tourists, Travellers and Hotels in Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem (with Chapman & Shapira) was published in 2013 by Maney Publishers in Oxford. He recently co-edited (with D. Vieweger), The Archaeology and History of the Church of the Redeemer and the Muristan in Jerusalem (Oxford, 2016).

Together with his twin brother (Daniel), Shimon was a child actor working for the Wendy Wisbey Acting agency in London, modeling clothes, and performing in television and movies, notably appearing with Joan Collins, George Cole, and Richard Harris. During the past twenty years, Gibson appeared in numerous television documentaries on archaeology and history produced for National Geographic, Discovery, History Channel, Smithsonian, and television outlets in Europe and the UK.