Western Quarter (Zone 2)

Overview

In the western quarter of the city are the remains of a four-room house. This quarter also contains a section of houses that all have front rooms facing the street, a center room divided by pillars, and one or two rooms integrated with the casemate wall of the city. The pillars partitioned the center rooms into two or three unequal elongated spaces. The pillars were made of flint stone drums, with an average dimension of 40 cm. x 40 cm. and a height of about 20 cm. The excavators suggest that one of these spaces, probably the largest one, may have been used as a courtyard. These buildings also have remains of staircases, indicating they either had second stories or their roofs were used as living spaces. In addition, each building had an additional long room connected to it. In these spaces the excavators found possible traces of some sort of industry, including remnants of an oven, a plaster installation, and a large stone hollow, raising the possibility that that these rooms were used as living and workshop spaces.

The casemate wall formed the fourth room of each of these buildings. Because the openings into the casemates were part of the original construction of the wall, it appears the wall was built first and the houses immediately after, thus suggesting their integration was planned from the start. The foundation of the casemate wall was protected by a white-plastered glacis and covered in pebbles. The wall’s foundation was 1.2 meters deep. It was not built in a straight line, but rather in a zig-zag pattern with a 25- to 30-centimeter deep salient and insets. Both this zig-zag pattern and the deep foundation were probably designed to stabilize the wall and reinforce it from outside battering.