Excavation Progress over 3 Months

Since I am just doing archaeological work at Givati one week a month, it is possible to see the progress of the excavation over time in the area where I am working. While I'm playing hookey the rest of the team continues with the excavation. So here are four pictures. The picture above was from the second week of June. You can just barely see the Roman wall vertically up from the bottom of the picture. Also a cistern from the Ummayad period in the foreground and a pit toward the right. A pit in the middle filled with buckets. Any of the pictures can be enlarged by clicking them.

The picture here is one month later, the second week of July. Notice a few things. You can see that the wall  that is just barely exposed in the first picture now is more pronounced, plus there's another wall perpendicular to it.  One of the last things we did was to remove all the stones in the lower left portion of the second picture so we could excavate below them. They were just sitting on fill and not part of any structure.

 Take a look at the bottom picture first.  Both are from August 6. It shows progress and the walls are more pronounced. The picture above is from the other direction and shows several Roman walls and the completed excavation of the Abbasid cistern. It is plastered and has a drain going into it from the top.  As you can see these are pretty massive walls, but it doesn't appear to be a public building.

Now I'm posting another pic from my September week of digging. In addition to the Roman wall, you can now see a wall of huge stones going across the pic that the Roman Wall was built over. We're not sure yet but think this is from the Second Temple Period. In fact, there are several walls emerging that need sorting out.