2007 Season of Excavations

In March 2007, the excavations at the site were resumed (IAA License G52/2007), picking up where we had left off in 2000. The object of the current excavations is to answer questions about the history of the strata represented at the site, from the Iron Age through to Medieval times. The sponsorship of this work has been undertaken by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The work was directed by Dr Shimon Gibson and Dr James Tabor. The staff consisted of Rafi Lewis (Haifa University), Mareike Grosser as site manager, with Ram Buchnik as archaeo-zoologist (Haifa University). An additional sponsor of this work was The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology, headed by Sheila Bishop. Funding for this season, including the cleaning of the site prior to the digging, was provided  courtesy of the Gutman Foundation and these fund were facilitated through ASOR.

The excavation took place over a period of only five days, but the results were quite important. It transpired that the houses from the Second Temple period (i.e. from the first century CE) are extremely well preserved, with vaulted basements and first-storey levels largely intact. These houses, which remained in ruins after the destruction of the city by the Romans in 70 CE, came to be sealed under an artificial levelling fill which was poured over the area at the time of the construction of the nearby Nea Church in the mid-sixth century CE, thereby preserving them in an amazing fashion. A few of the finds from the first century CE made this season include coins, a fragment of a stone vessel decorated with egg-and-dart designs, and a scale-weight. Important dating evidence was also uncovered this season, with coins and pottery, beneath fragmentary mosaic floors from the Byzantine or Umayyid periods (fifth to eighth centuries CE).