Horbat Zefat ‘Adi is a rural agricultural settlement approximately 2 kilometers north by northwest of Shefar’am and 2.5 km west of I’billin. It sits atop a hill, ca. 70–75 m above sea level, in the eastern portion of the ‘Akko Valley, and much of the site is highly disturbed due to modern activity, including the construction of a road, intense land cultivation, illegal construction, and the placement of a telephone cable. It was first excavated in 1996 as a salvage project prior to the expansion of a road. Further excavations were carried out in later years, irregularly from 1999 to 2006. Notable at the site were a Byzantine plastered chamber, probably a burial chamber; the intact and locally-made glass vessels found within the chamber; and the extent of Early Chalcolithic remains.
Ceramic and worked stone finds indicate that the settlement was first occupied in the Early Chalcolithic period. The ceramic assemblage from this period “is small and homogenous” (Smithline 2015: 14), but the excavators assumed that the Chalcolithic site was larger than what the ceramics indicated (much of the site was destroyed by development), potentially the only ‘large’ site from this period on the eastern side of the ‘Akko Plain. The site was more extensively inhabited beginning in the Early Bronze I, and was occupied until the Intermediate Bronze Age. Following this, there is a gap of over a millennium, until the Persian period. After this, the site was occupied in “Hellenistic, Early Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods” (Smithline and Stern 2004).
The main architectural phase at Zefat ‘Adi dates to the Byzantine period, dominated by a single large building complex that could have been a monastery involved in agricultural production. The settlement was abandoned following the Byzantine period, and partially reoccupied with the same building foundations during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. After a break of roughly 200 years, the site was occupied in the Fatimid period. A poorly preserved 20 meter-long wall from the 12–13th century shows that the excavated area was probably on the outskirts of a Crusader period site, likely inhabited by the Teutonic Order. Finally, Zefat ‘Adi was occupied in the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods with some new construction as well as reuse of the Byzantine building complex—perhaps again as a monastery.
The ceramic corpus from Horbat Zefat ‘Adi suggests that the inhabitants, at least from the Hellenistic through Roman periods, participated in both local trade networks within the Galilee and wider regional exchange with polities in Cyprus and Asia Minor. The assemblage primarily exhibits domestic and utilitarian characteristics; the imported goods and agricultural products of land cultivation were probably only intended for local consumption and not export.
