Kifrin

Excavation campaigns

Plan of the city of Kifrin.

The site is distinctly subdivided into two sectors: the city, whose southwestern part is protected by the river and whose opposite side faces the Jazira, along which runs a long line of turreted walls, and the citadel at the western end of the rocky spur dominating the bend in the river. Although their construction techniques and structures differ, the city walls and the citadel are built with the emplecton technique using local materials, stones and conglomerate (occasionally pottery fragments) mixed with gypsum mortar. The two curtains have quadrangular towers that are slightly larger and distant from one another in the city’s curtain.

Three moats outside the city walls, probably dug in one of the settlement’s final phases, run parallel to the walls and then make a 90 degree turn into the area inside the city, cutting across the defences. The preliminary analysis of the construction technique and of several structural relationships between the walls seems to back up the hypothesis that the citadel was built after the city. Anyhow, inside each sector, both city and citadel, several construction phases may be identified that cannot be dated with certainty due to the scarcity of material produced by the excavations whose date can be established for sure.