Tel Qatra is located in Israel's southern coastal plain, just east of an ancient road that connected the harbor towns of Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod. The ancient village is located on the ridge of a kurkar hill that rises around 70 m above sea level. It is close to a water source: the Nahal Soreq and its tributaries. Nahal Soreq exposes an alluvial calcareous soil. The soils to the north of the riverbed are brown–red degrading sandy soils, and the south of the river bed and closer to the site, are brown alluvial calcareous soils (https://openscholar.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/soilandwater/files/israel_north_hebrew.pdf).
At the end of the Roman period (3rd/4th century CE) a pottery workshop was set up in the area to the north-east of Tel Qatra. This workshop continued operating, with short breaks, until the end of the 7th or beginning of the 8th century CE. During this time, the pottery kilns repeatedly changed their location. Dumps of pottery wasters also changed locations together with the kilns, gradually covering an extensive area to the east of the Tel. Two of these dumps reached 3.5–4.0 m high. From the Roman period, contours of three circular kilns, with diameters from 3.00 to 3.5 m, have been identified. These kilns were built of burnt red bricks. Their wreckage included a few slags, wasters and fragments of jars dating from the second - third centuries CE. Two more kilns, found in the northwestern part of the excavation area, were better preserved, because their lower parts were cut into bedrock. These two kilns, along with a large building discovered to their south, operated as a unified complex at the beginning of the Byzantine period.*
* This description comes from Steve Weiner, Alla Nagorsky, Itamar Taxel, Yotam Asscher, Rosa Maria Albert, Lior Regeve, Xin Yan, Filipe Natalio, and Elisabetta Boaretto, "High temperature pyrotechnology: A macro- and microarchaeology study of a late Byzantine-beginning of Early Islamic period (7th century CE) pottery kiln from Tel Qatra/Gedera, Israel," JAS Reports 31 (2020).