Excavations in Field III at Gezer: The Solomonic Gateway

Apart from the very considerable interest of the architectural succession, the great archaeological appeal of the excavations is the tight control exercised in excavation, the detailed stratigraphic sequence that resulted in a long series of independent "close chronological horizons," and the systematic collection of almost all diagnostic pottery-of unprecedented value for, among other things, filling in the sparsely documented ceramic chronology of Israel, Judah, and the Hellenistic period. A small part of this stratigraphy was usefully exploited in Holladay 1990 ("Red Slip, Burnish, and the Solomonic Gateway at Gezer," BASOR 277/78, pp. 23¬70). This publication is specifically designed to illustrate the "balk-controlled debris-layer analytic" (true "Wheeler-Kenyon") mode of archaeology in the Middle East and in so doing will differ materially from other volumes in the Gezer series.