Video Transcript

The large quarry is one of the earliest subterranean installations we’ve uncovered in the site of Beit Lehi. This is probably the first quarry that the people who settled here in the third and the fourth century BCE used as a quarry to build their houses on an Ashlar Stone building. In a later period, in the Byzantine period, in the fifth and the sixth period, they used it as a water cistern; and we’ve found two crosses on the ceiling of the subterranean quarry. The nature of the rock, which is a soft Limestone, very close to a chalk, was easily hewn; and that’s the reason they used it to build their houses from the local rock.