Ruth Amiran (1914–2005)

Ruth Amiran, née Brandshteter, was a sabra born and raised in Yavne’el, south of Tiberias in the Lower Galilee, then in the British Mandate of Palestine, present-day Israel. She graduated from the Reali School in Haifa and studied archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She married David Amiran, a professor of geography at Hebrew University. She became a renowned archaeologist and researcher and worked in the Department of Antiquities, where she served as the supervisor of artifacts in the Galilee and in Jerusalem and as inspector of regional museums. In 1965, she helped found the Israel Museum. She was appointed the first curator of the Bronfman archaeological wing of the museum, which she had designed and planned. Her 1970 book Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land: From Its Beginnings in the Neolithic Period to the End of the Iron Age, is a standard reference work. Among her other publications were "Ancient Arad -- An Early Bronze Age City on the Desert Fringe and the Arad Fortress,” published in Archeological Survey of Israel, 1997. She received the Israel Museum’s Percia Schimmel Prize in Archaeology in 1981 and the Israel Prize in 1982.