During August 2008, a salvage excavation was conducted near the Nahal Yarmut stream channel, east of Road 38 (Permit No. A-5501; map ref. 1970/6270), in the wake of damage to an ancient wall caused while digging a trench for an electric cable. The excavation, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, was directed by Y. Billig, with the assistance of Y. Lender (administration), M. Kipnis (surveying), T. Kornfeld (drafting), L. Kupershmidt (metallurgical laboratory), C. Amit (studio photography) and D.T. Ariel (numismatics).
The wall was located c. 200 m north of the ‘Enot Deqalim/Khirbat el-Jiljil site, where irrigation systems and a structure of a Saqiye well (Persian-wheel; ESI 20:109*–110*).
One square was opened and a section of the wall, oriented northeast-southwest, was exposed. The wall was built of different size fieldstones, arranged unevenly. The tops of other stones that constituted the continuation of the wall were discovered slightly northeast of the square. West of the wall was a lens of light-colored soil and pebbles that had probably been used as a floor or a road. Between the stones in the wall and within the soil fill alongside it, on top of the light-colored level, were numerous potsherds from the Byzantine period, as well as two illegible coins, whose shape point to a feasible date in the fifth–sixth centuries CE.
The wall may have been used to delimit a road or cultivation plots; it could also have been the foundation of an irrigation channel that did not survive.