Image Details

COURTESY FRIEDBERT NINOW, BALU‘A REGIONAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT

A MOABITE HOUSE. Excavators work in and around a large residential building in the heart of Balu‘a whose earliest phase dates to the 11th–10th centuries BCE, though most of the excavated architecture dates to a century or two later. The building boasts three interior doorways with intact lintels. The row of sandbags near the top of the image roughly corresponds to the back wall of a small courtyard where archaeologists found heaps of collapsed stones that had fallen in noticeable patterns, suggesting the house was destroyed by an earthquake sometime in the eighth century BCE.