Ronny Reich - Excavations and Main Discoveries

Excavations and Main Discoveries

In 1989 Reich returned to archaeological field work, carried out at various Jerusalem sites:

• Burials from the late Iron Age/Israelite period and the Byzantine period in Mamillah, located just outside Jaffa Gate. This excavation unearthed a mass grave of the Christian Byzantine population massacred during the Sassanid sack of Jerusalem in 614. Other discoveries include an extramural complex of Byzantine buildings with a thermae, and a segment of the western city wall from the Ayyubid period.

• Between 1994 and 1996, in collaboration with Yakov Billig, Reich exposed a long segment of the stone paved road along the western wall of the Herodian Temple Mount, under Robinson's Arch. With Yuval Baruch, he exposed an area near the southern Temple Mount wall, east of the Hulda Gates.

• His possibly most important work is the ongoing excavations, begun in 1995 in collaboration with Eli Shukron, on the south-eastern hill of Jerusalem, identified as the City of David. On the south-western side of the hill the remains of a large stone-lined and stepped pool were exposed and identified as the Pool of Siloam. Nearby, a paved esplanade, a stepped street which ascends towards the Temple Mount and the main sewer under it, were unearthed, all from the Second Temple period (Early Roman).

• Of particular importance are Reich and Shukron's excavations near the spring identified with the biblical Gihon, on the eastern side of the City of David. Here, they uncovered additional elements of the water system known as "Warren's Shaft". The new discoveries were large elements, some constructed, some rock-cut. They offered a new understanding of how the Canaanite water system was created in the Middle Bronze II period (c. 18th-17th centuries BCE) and how it operated. These finds changed the common perception of how the system functioned, dominant from the initial discovery of the site in 1867 and up to 1995. The excavations have revealed that the spring was heavily fortified with a massive tower, constructed around it in the Middle Bronze Age II, and that Warren's Shaft itself was not part of the water system, certainly not an underground well, where water was drawn. Instead, they revealed a nearby element resembling a pool cut into the rock, where water was drawn.

• Another important discovery, near the Gihon spring, was a large waste heap. In a meticulous process of wet sifting, large amounts of non-epigraphic bullae (with graphic depictions but no script) and a huge amount of fish bones (Jerusalem is quite distant from the Mediterranean Sea; however, it is close to the Jordan River where 22 species of fish live) were discovered, dating to the late 9th – early 8th century BCE.

In 1995 Reich became a faculty member of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, teaching classical archaeology. He became associate professor in 2002 and full professor in 2006. Between 2002 and 2005 he served as the head of the department. Reich's lengthy activities in Jerusalem have made him a prominent scholar of the city's archaeology and history. For these contributions, he was awarded the 'Jerusalem Prize for Archaeology' by the City of Jerusalem in 2000. In 2012 he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, Class I.

In addition to his two major fields of interest (ritual baths and the archaeology of Jerusalem), he studied various aspects of daily life in Judaea in the late Second Temple period. These included studies on spindle whorls, stone vessels, ossuaries, inscriptions, etc. Of particular importance is his study on the stone scale weights, which were in use particularly in Jerusalem.

Reich has faced scrutiny for his connection to the right-wing Elad association.