Salvage excavations conducted at el-Khirba (modern Ness Ziona) have uncovered multiple pottery kilns that testify to the city’s importance as a center for pottery making that lasted for about thousand years (from Hellenistic to Umayyad periods). The complex of two pottery kilns that we reconstructed is from the Byzantine period (4th-7th centuries CE).

Pottery kilns had two rooms: the lower room called firing box (furnace) and the upper room called a firing chamber (where pottery vessels were set).