The results of the first season of the Jezreel Expedition are summarized at The Bible and Interpretation. The regional survey this summer was successful in preparing the team for beginning excavations next year. The article begins:

Members of the Jezreel Expedition headed by co-directors Norma Franklin (Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa) and Jennie Ebeling (Department of Archaeology and Art History, University of Evansville) conducted an intensive landscape survey of “greater Jezreel” in June 2012. The main goal of the inaugural season was to record surface features in a three square kilometer area to the west, north, and east of Tel Jezreel in order to identify areas for excavation in summer 2013 (Figure 1). The Jezreel team documented more than 360 features, including cisterns, cave tombs, rock-cut tombs, agricultural and industrial installations, terrace and village walls, quarries and more; most of these features had never been systematically recorded before. The results of this survey shed light on the extent of different settlements at Jezreel from late prehistory through to the 20th century CE Palestinian village of Zer’in.

The article also includes an image from the recent LiDAR scan. The city of Jezreel is best known as the location of Naboth’s vineyard and Jehu’s coup. Here Jehu ordered the deaths of the kings of Israel and Judah as well as Queen Jezebel (2 Kings 9-10). In a 2008 article, co-director Franklin argued that the fortified enclosure of Jezreel was constructed not by Ahab but nearly a century later by Jeroboam II. Tel Jezreel and Mount Gilboa from the west (photo from the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands, volume 2)

We first noted this discovery in March, but more details are available now that the media has picked up the story. From the Jerusalem Post.

The Megiddo cache is notable for its abundance of gold jewels, including nine large earrings and a ring-seal. It also includes than a thousand small beads of gold, silver and carnelian – a semi-precious stone of orange-to-amber hue. All of the artifacts are in good condition.
One of the collection’s most remarkable items is a gold basket-shaped earring bearing the figure of a bird, possibly an ostrich. Experts believe one of the items may be the first of its kind ever discovered in Israel, and that its use of gold points to possible Egyptian influence. Megiddo, the Armageddon of Christian Scripture, was for centuries a major trading post on the Egypt-Assyria trade route.
So far 25 Iron Age jewelry hoards have been uncovered in Israel, with most of them containing only silver artifacts.
“The hoard includes a lot of gold items, which have origins in Egypt,” said Eran Arie, a Tel Aviv University archeologist who was supervising the dig at the time of the jewels’ discovery.

The full story is here. More photos of the Iron I objects are posted at the Megiddo website.

Last night I was reading an interview with Cyrus Gordon, who made an interesting comment about the discovery of gold in the land of Israel.

I also went to see [W. M. Flinders] Petrie at Tell el-Ajjul, which he thought was ancient Gaza. He was wrong, but he found more gold in that one year than archaeologists have found in the past hundred years in every site combined (Scholars on the Record, p. 163).

Petrie worked at Tell el-Ajjul from 1930 to 1934; the interview with Gordon was first published in BAR Nov/Dec 2000.