In Situ Implementation of Imaging Techniques Reveals Key Motifs in the Early Byzantine Wall Painting of Christ’s Baptism at Shivta, Israel

The archaeological site of Shivta is located in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, forty-three kilometers southwest of the city of Beer-Sheva. Shivta became a large Byzantine village with approximately two thousand inhabitants during the fifth century CE and reached its peak during the sixth and seventh centuries. Fol-lowing the Islamic occupation of the area, it dramatically declined during the eighth and ninth centuries and never recovered (Negev 1974; Segal 1983, 1985; Avni 2014; Tepper, Weissbrod, and Bar-Oz 2015; Tepper et al. 2018).