Avraham (Avi) Faust is Prof. of archaeology at the Department of General History, Bar-Ilan University.

He received his degrees from Bar-Ilan University (PhD, 2000), and studied also at the University of Oxford (visiting graduate student) and Harvard University (post-doc). In 2008 he was Kennedy Leigh fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and in 2012/2013 he was a visiting professor at the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.

Avi Faust's research interests include the archaeology of the Land of Israel in the Bronze and Iron Ages (biblical archaeology), especially from social and anthropological perspectives, as well as aspects of settlement archaeology, urban-rural interaction, socio-economic stratification, ethnicity, and processes of social complexity. He participated in a number of excavations and surveys in Israel and abroad, and from 2006 he is directing the excavations at Tel 'Eton and the survey in its surrounding. Before that he directed (with A. Erlich) the excavations at Kh. er-Rasm (final report published in 2011).

He is the author of numerous books and articles covering various aspects of Israel's archaeology from the Early Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, with special focus on the Iron Age society, including the following Israelite Society in the Period of the Monarchy: An Archaeological Perspective (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2005 [in Hebrew]); Israel's Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2006; the book won three book prizes: the Irene Levi Sala Prize for books on the Archaeology of Israel, the ASOR's G.E. Wright Book Award and the Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award); The  Excavations at Kh. er-Rasm: The Changing Faces of the Countryside (Oxford:  Archaeopress, 2011) (with Adi Erlich); The Archaeology of the Israelite Society in the Iron Age II (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012); Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Desolation (Atlanta: The Society of Biblical Literature; 2012); The Settlement History of Ancient Israel: A Quantitative Analysis (Ramat Gan: Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies [in Hebrew], 2015) (with Zeev Safrai); The Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Southwest: Imperial Domination and its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); The Bible's First Kings: Uncovering the Story of Saul, David and Solomon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Research Interests:

Archaeology and History of the Bronze and Iron Ages and the Persian Period, Israelite Society, Social (Anthropological) Archaeology, Theoretical Archaeology, Archaeological Practice, Survey Methods and Methodology, Site Formation Processes. Special interest in the rural sector, social stratification, social and political organization, ethnicity, state formation processes, urbanization, cognitive archaeology and human-environment relations.