The Fortress Mound at Tel Arad: Excavated by Yohanan Aharoni from 1962 to 1967

The project focuses on the final publication of the excavations at the Fortress Mound at Tel Arad, located on the northern edge of the Beersheba–Arad Valley in southern Israel (162o North, 075o East). During the 1960s, a team directed by Y. Aharoni exposed a sequence of 13 strata: the lowest (Stratum XIII) belonged to a mid-3rd millennium BCE city, superimposed by the remains of a village established in the 10th century BCE (Stratum XII). The following six strata belonged to a fortress that was erected in the 9th century BCE (Stratum XI) and existed, with interruptions, until the early 6th century BCE (Stratum VI). The military function of Tel Arad was maintained well into later periods, epitomized in three subsequent forts assigned to the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods (Strata V–III). A waystation (Stratum II) functioned during the Early Islamic period. Finally, the mound was served for burial by Bedouins during the past millennium (Stratum I).

Tel Arad became famous in the archaeology of the southern Levant due to the abundance of finds from the Iron Age fortress. While it is unanimously associated with the Kingdom of Judah, scholars debated various issues, primarily on the temple uncovered in Strata X and IX (8th century BCE) and its implications for the study of religion in Biblical Judah. Another significant aspect of the fortress is the abundance of inscribed clay sherds, the remains of a local archive that illustrate daily life in the desert fringe and bear meaningful implications on the spread of literacy in the Iron Age. Unfortunately, Aharoni only managed to complete the full account of the Arad inscriptions before his untimely death in 1976. Since then, interim reports on the stratigraphy and the Iron Age pottery have been published by Prof. Ze'ev Herzog, co-director of this publication project, and Lily Singer-Avitz, respectively. Now, they are joined by Ido Koch in a project aiming to complete the processing of all data available in the excavation records and prepare the full report of Aharoni's excavations. The report will be published in the Monograph Series of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.

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