We ended the week with a very unique find, in the 9th cent BCE destruction level in Area A. An extremely interesting cache of cultic vessels were found in the destruction debris, including several phallic shaped vessels, pomegranate shaped vessels, rhyta, zoomorphic vessels and other objects.
The vessels were found in a small room with plastered benches, which seems to have functioned as a cultic corner within a larger, non-cultic oriented structure. The finds are quite exciting and should shed very interesting light on the Philistine cult and culture during the Iron Age IIA.
In addition, we have had some very interesting finds in other areas, including Iron I and Iron IIB levels in F, Iron IIA in D, additional EB II-III in E, LB/Iron I in P, and an apparently clean MB I context in C6.
The work continues ….
Aren
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July 23, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Avi Woolf
Out of curiosity…don’t you sometimes find the amount of material you’re finding daily to be overwhelming?
July 23, 2007 at 4:37 pm
arenmaeir
Naah – let it keep on coming …
Aren
December 11, 2007 at 1:57 pm
The “naked archaeologist” at the lab « The Tell es-Safi/Gath Excavations Official (and Unofficial) Weblog
[...] comb (comb_restored_lab.jpg) from the Iron Age I, and some of the fantastic cultic objects from the cultic corner that we discovered this [...]
December 19, 2007 at 5:21 pm
New Picture for top of blog « The Tell es-Safi/Gath Excavations Official (and Unofficial) Weblog
[...] notes on the discovery of this group during the season, see here and [...]
December 26, 2007 at 11:49 am
Register for 2008 Season! « The Tell es-Safi/Gath Excavations Official (and Unofficial) Weblog
[...] Just for the fun of it, see here a nice picture of a “kernos” (with a bull’s head, bird and miniature jar attached to the hollow “kernos” ring) that we found in the 2007 season in the Iron Age IIA cultic area. [...]
October 29, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Shalom Paul Fs - with an article on a find from Safi « The Tell es-Safi/Gath Excavations Official (and Unofficial) Weblog
[...] seasons ago. In the last two seasons, when we continued to excavated in the same area, we found the concentration of cultic objects that I have reported before, including another exactly similar [...]
July 13, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Update for Monday 13/7/09 « The Tell es-Safi/Gath Excavations Official (and Unofficial) Weblog
[...] a complete grinding stone from the early stage of the possibly cultic-related building (where the group of cultic vessels were found two years ago), and in Jill’s area, we are on the top of the 9th cent. destruction [...]