Leen Ritmeyer has posted a reconstruction drawing of Jerusalem during the Byzantine period, including an arrow pointing to the newly discovered Decumanus. (I think that I am the only one calling this street the Decumanus.)
Foundation Stone has a slideshow with 16 photos of the Decumanus excavation and press conference.
A 10th century Arabic inscription was discovered in excavations in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.
The IAA press release is here, but you can apparently only access the high-res photos by a direct link (zip).
Yahoo has a slideshow with about 5 photos of the Byzantine winepress.
Israel has added the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem to their list of national heritage sites.
HT: Joe Lauer
2 thoughts on “Weekend Roundup”
I certainly agree with you, Todd, that this street is the Decumanus. However, with all due respect, the name Decumanus appears already on the plan of Byzantine Jerusalem which I made in the 1970's for Prof. Nahman Avigad's book Discovering Jerusalem, p.227.
Leen – thanks for the comment. I didn't intend to take credit from you. I wasn't trying to take "credit" in any case, but was more wondering aloud why this simple identification wasn't made in any of the reports or blogs (even on your blog or plan) that I saw. One possibility is that the excavator or others think that they found "a" street, but not "the" main one, and thus not to be identified with the Decumanus. The difficulty with this is that the excavator said that he found the street shown on the Medeba Map. The identification seems simple and straightforward, so I was mystified why no one else was using the term.