Faculty & Staff 

Dr. Steve Ortiz is the Director of the Lanier Center for Archaeology at Lipscomb University and a professor of Archaeology and Biblical Studies. He was the director of the former Tandy Institute for Archaeology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the principal investigator and co-director, along with Sam Wolff, of the Tel Gezer Excavation Project and is one of the directors of the Ilibalyk Project, Kazakhstan, and is the co-director at Tel Burna (Biblical Libnah). He has over 30 years of archaeological experience in Israel as he has been a senior staff member at a variety of major sites. He has written and published extensively across a number of academic journals and books. His research and publications focus on the archaeology of David and Solomon, Iron Age I and II transition, and the border relations between Judah and Philistia. He has served or currently holds leadership positions in several scholarly and academic associations, currently serving on the board of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem. He has served ASOR since 2001 as a board member and on various committees.

Dr. Mark Janzen is an Associate Professor of Archaeology at Lipscomb University and specializes in Egyptology, history, and biblical archaeology. He currently serves as the deputy director of the Karnak Great Hypostyle Hall Project under the leadership of Dr. Peter Brand and the University of Memphis, an epigraphic project focusing on the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt. He has written on the historicity of Moses, New Kingdom Egyptian history, the Amarna period, epigraphy, various archaeological projects, and is the editor of Five Views of the Exodus (Zondervan, 2021). He currently co-hosts the OnScript podcast of the Biblical Worlds. He holds a Ph.D. in history/Egyptology from the University of Memphis under Dr. Peter Brand, and an M.A. in Biblical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School under Dr. James Hoffmeier. 

Dr. Chris McKinny is the Associate Professor of Archaeology at Lipscomb University. He is a host on the Biblical World podcast. Most recently, he was Director of Research at Gesher Media, where he helped produce a documentary on the Ark of the Covenant. As a senior staff member at the Tel Burna Archaeological project, Chris regularly leads study tours to the lands of the Bible. Passionate about the archaeology, history, and geography of the Biblical world, he has written extensively on these subjects in both academic and popular publications. He is the author of My People as Your People: A Textual and Archaeological Analysis of the Reign of Jehoshaphat (Peter Lang, 2016), and has co-edited several volumes, including The Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages of Southern Canaan (De Gruyter, 2018) and Tell it in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel: Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Zaphon, 2018).

Artifacts Curator & Collections Manager, Education Coordinator

Marcella Barbosa-Rigsby is a Ph.D. Candidate, ABD at Lipscomb University under the Lanier Center for Archaeology. She has pursued archaeology all of her life and excavated in Menorca, Cyprus, and Israel, with the majority of her time spent in nine seasons with the Tel Gezer Excavation Project. She currently excavates as an Area Supervisor at the Tel Burna Excavation Project. She spent five years as the Collections Manager for the Tandy Archaeological Museum in Fort Worth, TX at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.  She is currently working on her dissertation/Gezer publication research. She holds an M.A. in Archaeology and Biblical Backgrounds from Southwestern. 

Dr. Tom Davis was the Associate Director of the Lanier Center for Archaeology and a Professor of Archaeology at Lipscomb University and a specialist in the eastern Roman empire and biblical archaeology. He served on the editorial board of Buried History and on the Board of Trustees of the American Center of Research (ACOR) in Jordan. He has been author and editor of a plethora of academic publications, including the monograph Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology, published by Oxford University Press in 2004. Professor Davis has led field excavations in Kazakhstan, Cyprus, and Egypt and has lectured extensively in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. He has also served as principal investigator and field director at dozens of archaeological projects in the United States. Davis holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Arizona in Syro-Palestinian archaeology (1987 and 1983, respectively) and a B.A. in history and archaeology and Near Eastern studies from Wheaton College (1979).