Cline is an active field archaeologist with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, including ten seasons at the site of Megiddo in Israel, from which he has retired after serving as Co-Director with Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University. He is currently Co-Director, with Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa, of the renewed excavations at Tel Kabri, Israel, which have been conducted since 2005. Recent discoveries by Cline and his team include the Near East's oldest wine cellar.
Selected awards and recognition
Considered for a Pulitzer Prize, Cline has won awards for his books six times—he is a two-time winner of the "Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award" and a three-time winner of the Biblical Archaeology Society's "Best Popular Book on Archaeology" Award ; in addition, a volume that he co-edited won the 2019 G. Ernest Wright Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research. He has also won both national and local teaching awards, including the national "Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching" Award from the Archaeological Institute of America and the GWU "Morton Bender Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching" Award. In addition, he has received the two highest awards given at GWU: one for teaching, the "Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Award for Teaching Excellence", and the other for scholarly research, the "Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Award for Faculty Scholarship". He is the first faculty member in GWU history to have won both awards. He has been nominated three times for the CASE US Professor of the Year. In May 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Muhlenberg College. In July 2015, he was named a member of the inaugural class of NEH Public Scholars, receiving the award for his next book project entitled Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon, which was published by Princeton University Press in March 2020. In Fall 2018, Cline was initiated into the world's first Archaeology Fraternity, Delta Iota Gamma. In May 2020, Cline was named a Getty Scholar for the 2020-21 academic year.
Selected publications (books)
Cline is the author or editor of 20 books. Many have been translated, into a total of 18 languages, including French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian. They include:
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: International Trade and the Late Bronze Age Aegean,
The Aegean and the Orient in the Second Millennium. Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Symposium, Cincinnati, 18–20 April 1997, edited with Diane Harris-Cline
Amenhotep III: Perspectives on His Reign, edited with David B. O'Connor,
The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age,
Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel,
The Ancient Egyptian World, written with Jill Rubalcaba,
Thutmose III: A New Biography, edited with David B. O'Connor,.
