Ba'un
BAP011 JADIS2119.008
When Mittman visited Ba'un the modern village was quite small, and a number of 19th century houses remained. By the time of our initial reconnaissance in April 2006, the listed UTM co-ordinates fell in the middle of the modern village, under a road, next to the mosque. A vacant lot with some abandoned old stone houses seemed to have sufficient pottery on it for our project’s purposes, however, so we ear-marked this as our target site.
The site of Ba'un
Returning to Ba'un in November and investigating further, we found a ploughed orchard field under the cliff of Ba'un which was littered with large, sharply broken pottery. We elected to sample this area, which also corresponded better with Mittman’s description of where he, too, had seen a concentration of pottery. The landowner informed us that at some time in the past, the top of the cliff had been bulldozed over the edge to flatten the area for modern housing. We presume that part of these bulldozed deposits were pushed into the field we were sampling, but the area is also likely to have been the rubbish dump for ancient Ba'un as well.
There was so much pottery in the field that no scrape of a 5m x 5m square was made.
Pottery density
Two 1m x 1m soundings were dug, one in the field and one at the top of the cliff, in order to determine whether settlement deposits remained above. Neither sounding detected definite stratigraphy, so the nature of both areas remains unclear.
Ba'un sounding
Excavation to a greater depth, probably in an area greater than 1m x 1m would be needed to determine the nature of the site, but is beyond the scope of the project. Examination of the ceramics suggests 6th century and later occupation, extending into the Mamluke period.
5 x 5m pottery pick-up
Door lintel