By Benno Rothenberg /Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114099757

A trip through the ages with the ageless Avraham Biran

Do you see those pottery sherds?” asks 92-year-old Avraham Biran as he points with his cane to the sun-baked earth of Aroer, an ancient site in the northern Negev. Not until I crouch close to the ground can I distinguish the reddish brown sherds from the stones and pebbles that cover the site. “That’s how you know this is a tell, that it was inhabited,” Biran explains.

By the time I stand up, the nonagenarian has hurried on ahead of the small group that has come with him to revisit Aroer, a site he excavated more than 20 years ago.a When we reach him, Biran is already at the top of the tell. “Welcome to Aroer,” he tells our slower-moving group.

“You have to walk fast to keep up with this guy,” whispers Gila Cook to me with a laugh. Cook, a surveyor at Hebrew Union College’s Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem, which Biran heads, worked with Biran on the Aroer dig.

Excerpted from Return to Aroer in the online Biblical Archaeology Society Library.