Jan Gunneweg was borne in Schiedam, Holland, in 1939.

After completion of Doctorandus in Theology in Louvain, Belgium, and Doctorandus in Biblical Sciences and Archaeology at the PIB in Rome, Jan moved to Israel in 1970 to work on his dissertation with Yohanan Aharoni on the subject of "Fire-Installations in Biblical Millieu". A few years later, Yohanan passed away and Jan was without an advisor.

Meanwhile, he participated as a supervisor in excavations such as Biblical Beer Sheba (Aharoni), Khirbet el Meshash (Fritz & Kempinski), Qotel (Benjamin Mazar), Nabi Salah (Beit-Arieh) and Akko (Dothan).

In December 1973, Jan joined Isadore Perlman who had founded the Department of Archaeometry in the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Iz asked him to make his doctorate with him.

In 1979 the doctoral dissertation with I. Perlman and A. Negev on The provenience of Terra Sigillata in the eastern Mediterranean was completed.After that, he became a lecturer in archaeometry.

In 1985, Jan became a staff member of the Archaeometry Unit at the Hebrew University and Senior Lecturer

In 2001, he was appointed by the Israeli ministry to be the representative of Israel for Cultural Heritage in the European Community's Cost G8 Action until 2006.

During that period he edited two books (+/- 800 pages) on the Bio- and Material Cultures at Qumran, after having held a Qumran Meeting in May 2005, entirely consecrated to a scientific approach of Qumran archaeology and the Dead Sea scrolls. Collaborative research in physics and chemistry was done with around 120 scientists from 45 institutions in 18 countries most of them in Europe.

The best way to start what has been published is to enter http://micro5.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msjan/archaeom.html and to go from there to websites of interest.