Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on June 30, 2022

UC San Diego has received a $1 million bequest from the late Orange County philanthropist Norma Kershaw to expand its wide-ranging archaeological studies in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Israel.

Much of the money will be used to support cyber-archaeology, which combines archaeology, computer science, engineering and the natural sciences in ways that help scientists to create rich visualizations of research sites and artifacts.

UCSD captures some of this 3-D digital data with the use of flying drones and underwater camera systems, both of which were used to explore and analyze a 3,500-year-old submerged town along the coast of Greece, the university says.

The program is led by Tom Levy, an archaeologist who works at the UCSD-based Qualcomm Institute, a technology test bed. He says hes especially interested in examining how the culture, climate and environment of theeastern Mediterranean have changed over the past 10,000 years. Hes already conducted such work at Tel Dor, an archaeological site along the coast of Israel.

Norma was a visionary who believed in the importance of archaeology for understanding who we are and how we got here, Levy said in a statement.

For Norma, the aim of creating endowments at leading U.S. universities was her specific love for the archaeology of Israel, and, on a larger scale, to contribute to the greater good of the American society.

Kershaws earlier support included donated money for endowed chairs at UCSD and UCLA.

Excerpt from:

UCSD gets $1M gift to expand archaeological studies of Israel, eastern Mediterranean - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Category: Israel
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