Today in Archaeological circles an article from Ha’aretz has been making the rounds on the internet.

You can read the article here: King Solomon-era Palace Found in Biblical Gezer

Photo from Tel Gezer Excavation Project, Steven M. Ortiz

The lead photo in the article was an aerial photo of the site. You can see the Iron Age gates of Gezer on the left in the picture.

Since I had used a picture of the Iron Age gates in my post A Geezer went to Gezer, I thought I would check and see if I also had pictures of the excavations of the palace.

Luke Chandler and I visited Gezer last year while we were digging at Lachish.

Luke also wrote a blog post about the discovery today: 10th Century BC “Solomonic” Palace Found at Gezer

I could tell from the picture in the article that it was probably not the work of one season of digging and I also remembered that there were some fresh excavations last year when we visited.

Sure enough, I had some pictures of the dig site. Here you can see that quite a bit of the palace was already unearthed last year. This was most likely at the beginning of their season so most of this would have been from 2014.

This picture was taken from just near the Iron Age gates. You can see that quite a bit had been uncovered. If you compare this picture with the picture from the article you can match up some of the features.

It is always exciting to learn more about excavations that you have visited in the past.

We had planned on visiting Gezer again this year as it was one of the site trips from our dig. We missed out on the trip and didn’t get to see the new excavations, but that is another story that may or may not be told in the future.

I had hoped to get another picture with the standing stones of Gezer. I guess I will have to go back again next year 🙂

Steven