Tel Megiddo East is the name given to a large area of human settlement east of the better knownTel Megiddo. The sites east of Tel Megiddo were first explored by G. Schumacher. In addition to work at Horvat Muzzav, he also conducted brief mapping of the (Ottoman?) ruins on the east bank of the Wadi 'Ain el-Qubbi at the western edge of Tel Megiddo East. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute expedition excavated Early Bronze Age I (and other) material on the eastern slope of the tel, the "Megiddo Stages". In the 1970s, A. Raban visited all of the sites in the vicinity of the tel for surface collection and consulted local residents about illicit discoveries in the vicinity. He identified Tel Megiddo North, ‘Ain el-Qubbi, Edh Dhahar, Tel Megiddo East, ‘Ain el-Qubbi South, and Tel Megiddo South as locations of dense EB I and Roman-era sherds. Taken together, these sites cover an extensive 125 acres (50 ha). Though the survey was inconclusive about their contiguity, Raban speculated that all of these concentrations may delineate a large unwalled settlement contiguous with the EB I remains from the tel. 

Renewed excavation by the Megiddo Expedition of Tel Aviv University revealed of a massive monumental temple complex dating to the late 4th/early 3rd millennium BCE. The complex consists of an artificial platform with a revetment established by a stone wall 4 m in width. This platform supports the largest single edifice of the period in the entire Levant, the “Great Temple.” This massive, broad-room temple is approximately 50 m wide and more than 30 m long and is meticulously engineered such that the thicknesses of walls and their distance from each other are exact in every dimension.

This EB Ib temple lent credibility to Raban’s hypothesis that a large settlement existed at Megiddo during that period. As part of the Megiddo Hinterland Project, these sites were resurveyed in more detail. The spread of EB I pottery was confirmed, but the results still left the question of contiguity with each other and the tell in question. To address this question, the Megiddo Expedition conducted a magnetic survey of portions of the settlement and determined that, indeed, the entire scatter was one massive site. With this apparent confirmation, greater Megiddo immediately became the earliest and largest major settlement in the southern Levant. Ultimately, Finkelstein and Ussishkin concluded that the temple remains on Tel Megiddo served as the cultic acropolis for the sprawling Early Bronze Age settlement to the north, east, and south.

The site is currently under excavation by the Jezreel Valley Regional Project, Directed by Matthew J. Adams (Bucknell University).

www.jezreelvalleyregionalproject.com