A POPULAR EXCAVATION REPORT for the third season at Ramat Rahel:

Digging through the Bible
By WILL KING (Jerusalem Post)

The third season of renewed excavations at Ramat Rahel in Jerusalem has come to a close, with several exceptional finds that have increased archeologists' understanding of the site.

The excavations are the result of a joint project between Tel Aviv University and the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and are scheduled for another three seasons, with the next to begin in the summer of 2009.

Dig director Dr. Oded Lipschits of Tel Aviv University said that the goals of this year's dig were to expand the area around a Byzantine (fourth-seventh centuries CE) church previously excavated by Yohanan Aharoni of the Hebrew University in the 1950s, and to further expose a garden and a profound water system from a palace or administrative building that was in use from the late Iron Age (seventh-sixth centuries BCE) until the beginning of the Hasmonean period in the 2nd century BCE.

These goals were met, he said. "We understand much better the time and the extent of the garden."

[...]

Read on for a debate between Lipschits and Gabriel Barkay over aspects of the site.