The Byzantine and Early Islamic settlement of Khirbat ... - web journal

Marwan Abu Khalaf, Ibrahim Abu A‘mar, Salah Al-Houdalieh, Robert Hoylandof white plaster. Some very small tesserae hint at fine designs, possibly with human figures.The walls are 78-87 cm thick and made with roughly dressed stones… The roof was coveredwith wood and tiles, as required by the thin walls; in fact we saw fragments of tiles. Scatteredaround was also a large quantity of Byzantine sherds of the usual well-known types». 6Finally, the Israel Antiquities Authority included an entry on Khirbat Shuwayka intheir survey of the hill-country of Benjamin, conducted in the mid-1980s, whichreads: “Ruin; terraces; traces of monumental building with columns; arcosolia burialcave; cisterns”. And their surface sherding at the site gave the following statistics:“Hell – 9%; Rom – 8%; Byz – 79%; Eis – 4%; 99 sherds”. 73. The Residential ComplexIn 2001 and 2003 attentionwas turned to thenorthern part of the westside which seemed to constitutepart of a residentialcomplex of some sort. In2001 a small portion of itwas excavated, square H8(figs. 1-3), without anyclear identification beingmade as to the nature ofthe building. This squareconsists of two rectangularrooms divided by awall with an entrance atthe western end. Thenorthern room is approximately1.85 x 3.50 m and2. Plan of the squares dug by al-Quds University 1996-2001.the southern room approximately 2.05 x 3.23 m. It is thought that the entrance waybetween them was closed during the Abbasid period, since most of the deposits ofglazed pottery fragments found there belonged to that period. It seems that theAbbasids used the site right down to the bedrock that forms the floor of the rooms,and hence there were only found a few pottery fragments sticking to the Byzantinewall on the east side of the rooms. In the western wall (L2) of these rooms one can still6 Bagatti 2000, 121-122.7 Finkelstein, Magen 1993, no. 174.http://www.webjournal.unior.it - (II) 2006 50ISSN 1827-8868