Ashkelon, Day 32.
This is sort of a final report and recap. It's going to run a bit long, so you might want to bail at this point. It's also going to involve pictures.



I took a few pictures while the photographer was photographing; this one is from the southeastern corner.



And this one is from the north. These two combine to show how things looked at the end of the season. I'm going to try and go back and identify features, which might well involve coming back to these pictures.



Working backwards, the wall to the left in this picture is the latest bit of architecture to come up in the square; it's the corner of one of the walls that they put up in the twenties to preserve the part of Garstang's excavation that's currently the sculpture garden.



That wall is now circled in red in that shot from the southeast corner.



Moving back in time, the next thing we have are a few Ottoman period structures. The first was the big terrace wall that took up most of the eastern half of the square; this is one of the pictures of that wall which I took early on.



Most of the terrace isn't currently exposed, but I've circled whatever bits are showing now that we've finished digging for the season.



Moving further back, we get a couple of crusader period pits. They're gone now; one of them is visible in the section, but not in the pictures I've taken. Sorry about that. What exactly the function of those pits was isn't clear. People dig holes, and sometimes line them with stuff. It's just the way we are.



Next thing we get is a plaster layer that was probably debris from the roof or walls of an Abbasid period structure. It's circled in red here.



Here's what's left of it. It also includes the floor that we found underneath it. We'll get to that next.



Thusly. There were a few marble tiles above the plaster that was above these flagstones, but I haven't got a good picture of them. Still, the flagstones are rather nice. Based on ceramic evidence, this seems to have been an Abbasid period floor.



Now, this is the only wall with a clear relationship to the floor. This one didn't have a very deep foundation -- it was "floating", that is, resting on dirt, only a foot or so below the level of the floor.



Well, the only wall other than this one; of course, this isn't a very convincing wall. It might have been an internal wall, but so little of it was preserved that it's hard to call it a wall. There hasn't been anything additional that's come up that's explained the circular structure, either.



There were another couple of walls which might relate to that structure. You'll recall this view of the big wall -- those three phases of the wall's construction were confirmed as we dug lower. The bit circled in green might have been part of an intersecting wall, or a floor. It didn't go as far down as the flagstone floor; it might be related to the floor, but it might not. The area circled in blue goes down far enough that it could have been related to the floor. One thing that might indicate that it was related to the floor was that there seems to have been a foundation trench; it cuts the levels below the fill that seems to have been laid below the floor, but it doesn't cut that layer. Which means that it should have been dug shortly before the floor was laid.



And this is what the wall looked like at the end of the season; you can get a sense of the levels here. It seems likely that the bit circled in green is going to fall off between now and the next season, though it might not. The bit circled in blue might get undermined if it rains a lot, but it should survive at least one winter.



And then there's this. It's rather hard to define what exactly is a wall, and what isn't. We actually took off a few rocks from the top before we realized that we were actually dealing with a wall, rather than a few stones from the edge of the floor.



Here's the end of the season shot, with that wall circled in red. It's hard to relate it stratigraphically with the floor, but the ceramic associated with it does seem to have Abbasid pottery associated with it. So it might have been an earlier Abbasid structure, related to the construction of the floor, or something else entirely.



And then we get a couple of features from the Byzantine period. The bit circled in blue is the earlier phase of the big wall; the probe we dug to the south of it shows that that phase of the wall goes further down than the bit that seems related to the Abbasid period. And the bit circled in red is a platform of some sort. We haven't gotten down far enough to make much sense of it; given another week, we'd have put a probe through some of that plaster, and tried to see what's underneath it. As it is, it's a bit feature, whose purpose is entirely unclear. Also, it's got a random ashlar sitting on it.



And, finally, we have this. It looks like there's another wall, in the area between the Byzantine wall and the plaster structure. Here, I'll draw a bit on it.



Those stones just don't look like floor bedding. The plaster might be, though.

So, let's recap:

The earliest structure that we've got in this area is that last wall; it was probably part of the Roman basilica. That basilica probably fell out of use in the early Byzantine period. At some later point during the Byzantine period, after a certain amount of fill accumulated on top of the Roman structures. They then put in a wall that seems to parallel the curve of the Roman wall, and built a great big structure to the north of it. The curved shape of the wall segment we have might indicate that there had been a theater there; if so, the plaster structure might have been related to the seating for the theater. But that's rather, er, "speculative" is the word generally used for stuff based on that sort of evidence.

And then that building falls out of use. Possibly due to an earthquake -- there was supposed to be one in the area in the mid-seventh century.

During the ninth century, or thereabouts, someone decided to put a building there. There had probably been some robbing of stone from the Byzantine period by that point, but there was enough of the Byzantine wall left to put the foundation against. The builders laid a very pottery rich fill over the rest of the Byzantine remains. The pottery had probably come from elsewhere on the site; it might have been used as sub-floor fill because the pottery would drain better than dirt. In either case, they did that to make the surface they were laying the floor on flat. Then they put down a sub-floor bedding, and a flagstone floor on top of that. It's not entirely clear if there was another bedding laid down, and then a tile floor laid on top of it as part of the floor's construction, or if that was a later phase of the floor's construction.

Some crusaders, or people living there during the Crusader period put a few pits through the floor. What they were doing isn't clear, and they didn't leave any other signs of their occupation. Later, during the Ottoman period, there was more stone robbing, and someone put a terrace wall in across about half the square. Given that it's a nice flat area within the city ramparts, it seems likely that it wasn't abandoned for the hundreds of years during which we don't have any signs of occupation. Maybe it was used for agriculture since the Abbasid building was abandoned? Or something else that didn't leave any evidence we could find.

Then, in the 1920s, Garstang dug some trenches, one of which touched the edges of the square. There was a bit of other stuff that happened during the twentieth century -- we turned up a firepit, and what was probably a pit dug for a picnic table. And that's it.

I'll be off to Tel Safi later today, where I'll have rather less internet access. Hope you all enjoyed the account, and that it made at least a little sense. Hopefully, I'll be back to long stretches of not posting interspersed with occasional things about writing that doesn't sell. I'll be at Safi for about three weeks, which should give me a bit of a head start on the "long stretches of not posting".



But before I go, it's worth mentioning that on his birthday, Uriel got presents!



And he got a dig t-shirt a week or so later.

See you all around!