General Information

SoLev Friable Brown Cooking Ware (FBCW) is a distinctive friable and lower-fired brownish grey fabric, tempered with sand and larger visible white inclusions, detected at Ashkelon and used almost exclusively in the production of grooved everted rim cooking pots, which first appear at Ashkelon in the middle of the second century BCE. The raw material is Israel/Negev coastal loess, characteristic of the region to the east and south of Ashkelon. This local fabric is used to produce other cooking wares at Ashkelon during the Persian and Hellenistic periods, as well as in earlier eras, but its brownish-grey color, friable texture, and firing processes (lower temperature, reduction firing) distinguish FBCW from the other Ashkelon coarse and cooking wares produced in this fabric.

FBCW vessels are reduction-fired resulting in a a brownish-grey (7.5YR 4/3) to pale brown fabric with  visible small sand and carbonatic inclusions. In hand sample, the inclusions appear both smaller and more numerous than those in the standard Hellenistic cooking wares from Ashkelon, and there are visible narrow rectangular voids which suggest organic temper. The texture is unusually soft and distinctively crumbly. All vessels are regularly slipped with a grayish-black (2.5Y 4/1) watery slip. Shapiro (2022) has assigned this to Ashkelon's local coastal group B, equivalent to Martin (2017) Group PG1a, LCP's Israel/Negev coastal loess.