Wednesday, January 19, 2005

A SECOND-TEMPLE-ERA WINERY AND VILLAGE have been uncovered in a salvage excavation in Israel. Excerpt from the Ha'aretz article:
Five wine presses surrounded the farmhouse, built in the third century BCE, on land between what today is Moshav Gan Sorek and the Tel Aviv-Ashdod highway.

[...]

The winery's customers also included residents of the closest settlements. One of these settlements was a large village barely half a kilometer north of the farmhouse, and was completely unknown until the salvage excavations conducted by Uzi Ed, Angelina Dagot and Kareem Sa'id of the Israel Antiquities Authority in the latter months of 2004.

The village covers more than 15 dunams (3.75 acres) and the dig uncovered what looks like its southern residential neighborhood and its industrial zone. Among the buildings and facilities found by the archaeologists were a kiln for firing pottery and a reservoir pit that apparently was part of an agricultural compound that did not survive, designed to collect the sediment waste from liquid that gathered in it - either water or grape juice. East of the village are 11 round pits believed to have been used for dumping garbage, as they contained mainly cinders and animal bones.

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