The find of the week

The sixth week of excavation at Bethsaida took place during October 4th – 9th and was carried out with an extremely enthusiastic group of people from Trinity Southwest University at Albuquerque New Mexico, headed by Dr. Steve Collins. We excavated the in two different loci. We continued the probe in chamber 2 where we discovered the top of a wall that belongs to stratum 6.
This discovery is very important because we retrieved for the first time a segment of the inner city gate that underlay the Four Chamber City Gate.
The pottery that we discovered was all dating from the 10th century BCE and some even to the 11th century BCE. We hope to know more about the inner city gate in the earliest phase. Next season we hope to work more on this area and to learn more about the earliest gate of Bethsaida. It sounds exciting isn’t it?

Another locus was excavated at the wall connecting the bastion and the outer city gate. This area contains the collapse of the Roman city wall and we removed large boulders and rocks that came down from that wall. Among the finds that we made was a nice large bronze coin, not yet cleaned, that was discovered while sifting. Once again we discover the importance of sifting of each and every bucket. The purpose of the dig here is to remove the collapse of the Roman city wall and to find the full width of the Iron Age wall.

In the picture Tanja Kraft showing the coin she found while sifting.