Week 4 – Day 1

Today – we started the final week of the excavation and already we have begun to prepare for closing down the excavation.

A1 – Jane joined forces with the B3 crew (who closed down their area last week) and they made some nice progress exposing a wall with plaster in the Late Iron IIA destruction.

A2 – Debi and co. closed down the area for the season today and did a lot of sweeping!

B2 – Aharon got some new recruits this week from Ariel and A2 and they will continue to excavate tomorrow in a few places. It is now really clear that the outer fortification wall is floating and was probably not in place during the early Iron IIA destruction. Clay and others also continue to excavate inside of the fortification where we now have a nice stretch of the original casemate fortification.

G – We finished several small projects today exposing different parts of the area for the final aerial. Significantly! it seems that Shawn discovered one of the gate sockets! At this point, it is not clear if this relates to the 8th-7th century gate or an earlier gate. We will try and find out next year… stay tuned – now that we have one gate – why not one more 🙂

We were also visited by several people including Benjamin Foreman (The Master’s University), David Ben Shlomo and Michael Freikman (Ariel University) and John More (Bible Passages).

Benjamin Yang was interviewed by Good TV – a leading Christian news agency in Taiwan and China.

This afternoon – Itzick and I led a group from Tell es-Safi/Gath around the tel – as always it was great to catch up with our doktorvater (Aren Maeir), old friends and colleagues.