Overview

Bibliography

Tel Masos, also known as Khirbet el-Meshash, consists of three sites: a small tel with an Iron II village followed by a Byzantine monastery, a large Iron I village, and a Middle Bronze enclosure on the south side of a wadi. Only part of the large Iron I village is visible today and is presented in the Virtual World Project. The houses have been numbered 1 through 9 on the site plan for easy reference.

Tel Masos is located in the northern Negev, approximately 12 kilometers east of Beersheba. The Iron I village was the largest site in the region, covering an area of approximately 200 by 150 meters, and may have been the head of a small polity. The ancient name of the site is unknown, though numerous suggestions have been made without being persuasive.

The site of the Iron I village was first surveyed by C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener in 1874 in their survey of eastern Palestine. The other two sites were not discovered until the surveys of Yohanan Aharoni in 1964 and 1967. The Iron I village was excavated by Volkmar Fritz and Aharon Kempinski in 1972–1975 on behalf of the University of Mainz and Tel Aviv University.

Three strata of continuous habitation were discovered in the Iron I village. A variety of house forms were discovered: four-room and three-room houses, broadroom houses, a courtyard house, and an Egyptian style house. A couple of large buildings (not preserved) were perhaps public buildings of some sort. The finds represented a wide variety of local and imported pottery, copper and bronze implements, and scarabs, suggesting a diverse population with connections to many of the surrounding regions.

The archaeological strata uncovered at the site, as illustrated in the site plan, date to the following periods:

	Stratum II
	Stratum III