Masada Northern Palace. By avinoam michaeli, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12393200

Sometimes we make discoveries not by digging in the ground, but by digging in the records of past excavations. So it is with Masada, Herod’s nearly impregnable palace-fortress in the Judean wilderness, occupied and defended by Jewish Zealots during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. Masada was excavated in the 1960s by Israel’s most illustrious archaeologist, Yigael Yadin. It was a massive effort mobilizing hundreds of volunteers from all over the world. Yadin died in 1984, his final report still incomplete. Led by archaeologist Ehud Netzer, a team of scholars has taken up the task of analyzing the vast number of finds uncovered during Yadin’s three full years of digging.
In the BAR 17:06, Netzer looked at Yadin’s records and observed puzzling patterns of conflagration in the buildings on the mountain.a With the aid of Josephus’ accounts of the fall of Masada, Netzer proposed a new understanding of how the Jewish defenders—during their desperate last days—scavenged the buildings on Masada to build a wood-and-earth reinforcement wall to withstand the war machines of the Roman army.

I was asked to undertake a study of a different aspect of the military situation at Masada—the arms and armor discovered at the site. This large and diverse group of arms and armor includes arrowheads and arrow shafts, armor scales, shields, swords, spears, javelins, iron points and a scabbard chape (the tip of a sword sheath). All of these weapons have a story to tell. Sometimes they solve puzzles. Sometimes they create them. They almost always raise more questions than they answer.

Read the rest of Masada- Arms and the Man in the online Biblical Archaeology Society library.