Khirbet Kurkush

In 1870, the site was visited by Victor Guérin, who described it as a ruined Arab village covered with brushwood, and noted a few ancient cisterns in its vicinity. Guérin most likely didn't notice the surrounding necropolis, which the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) surveyed three years later. PEF described the site as "a ruined village with a fine cemetery of rock-cut tombs, and traces of ruins. A large birkeh, or tank, and extensive quarries also exist, with two sarcophagi cut in the rock, and still attached to it. [...] Six tombs were here planned [...]", and included an in-depth account of the necropolis, including a few diagrams. The site was surveyed again by the École Biblique, and after the 1967 Six-Day War, it was surveyed by Yosef Porat as part of the "Emergency Survey" (1968), and in additional surveys conducted by Shimon Dar (1982), Israel Finkelstein (also 1980s), Yitzhak Magen (2002) and Dvir Raviv (2013). In 1983, Finkelstein and Lederman's team surveyed Khirbet Kurkush, finding pottery dating from the Iron Age to the Ottoman era. They described it as featuring remnants of buildings, some with intact vaults, along with quarries and elaborately decorated Hellenistic/Roman tombs, including an impressive "rock-cut 'courtyard' with decorated facades of rock-cut tombs". A salvage excavation was carried out at the site in 1991 by Shimon Riklin, on behalf of the Staff Officer for Archaeology of the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria. == Necropolis ==

About 200 meters to the east of the ruins, in a quarry that was probably used to build the settlement's houses, a necropolis was found, where 18 burial caves with kokhim are visible, with a number of open-air trough tombs carved between them. The rest of the tombs, which are simpler, are made in a fairly uniform format - an entrance room with a barrel vault, an opening that was blocked with a rolling stone, and a burial chamber with a central standing pit around which large niches are carved, with their own rolling stones. A number of these tombs have architectural decorations, such as a quarry that simulates hewn smooth stones with chiseled edges or columns with Doric capitals. A row of stones in the Herodian style was another intriguing discovery. == Debate over the site's culture ==

The majority of site researchers preferred to assume that the site's inhabitants were Jews, with Magen and Ricklin being the exceptions, who suggested that the site was inhabited by Samaritans or possibly pagan populations. Raviv and other archeologists concluded that the Khirbet Kurkush necropolis, along with other similar sites in western Samaria, is to be associated with wealthy Jewish families who lived in the area during the late Second Temple Period. They based this on the similarity of the necropolis' architecture and ornamentation to Jewish tombs in Jerusalem as well as the area's position as a buffer between a Samaritan-majority area and a Jewish-majority area. The discovery of an underground hideout complex close to the nearby Palestinian village of 'Aboud, which is filled with findings brought by Jewish refugees during the Bar Kokhba revolt, as well as the fact that the nearby site of Khirbet Tibneh, which has been identified as ancient Thamna, served as the capital of a toparchy in Judaea during the same period, are evidence of the presence of Jews in this part of western Samaria. ==See also==