*49 Judea and Samaria Research Studies | Volume 26 Number 2 | 2017 Excavations at Khirbet el Mastarah, the Jordan Valley, 2017 David Ben-Shlomo and Ralph K. Hawkins* Abstract This article presents the results of the 2017 excavations at Khirbet el Mastarah in the middle Jordan Valley near ‘Aujah. The site was identified by Zertal in the fifth volume of his series, The Manasseh Hill Country Survey, and its main occupation was dated to Iron Age I. Ben-Yosef grouped the site as one of the main Iron Age I ‘complex oval compounds’, possibly representing the presence of a new pastoral population in the region. The results of the excavation so far have, however, not yielded a clear date for the structures built at the site. In general, the site was very poor in finds, which date from the Middle Bronze through to the Ottoman period. The excavation results and their implications as well as suggestions for further research are discussed. Key words: Jordan Valley, complex oval enclosures, Manasseh Hills Country Survey, Iron Age As a part of the Manasseh Hills Country Survey, a monumental project carried out by the late Adam Zertal and continued by his students (Zertal 2004; 2005; 2008; 2012; Zertal and Mirkam 2016; Zertal and Bar 2017), the area of the ‘middle Jordan valley’, between Fasael and ‘Aujah, was also intensely surveyed (Zertal 2012). Zertal has identified a rise in sites in this region in the Jordan Valley in general between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age I; a further rise in settlements occurs between Iron Ages I and II. Subsequently, Ben-Yosef studied these sites and suggested a model for the Iron Age I settlement in the region (Ben-Yosef 2007; 2014; 2015). However, while several surveys and studies were conducted in the region that lies between the lower Jordan Valley and the eastern Samaria hills (eastern Manasseh Hills), the region is almost unknown from the archaeological excavations of sites especially from the second millennium BCE. Within this survey, the site of Khirbet el-Mastarah, a relatively large site with many structures visible on the surface, was surveyed and described in 2004, later published as Site No. 113 in Zertal 2012 (Fig. 1). The site was dated by Zertal mainly to Iron Ages I and II. None of the oval or complex oval compound type sites in this region had been excavated, and we therefore decided to excavate the site of Khirbet el-Mastarah. We carried out a short excavation in June 2017, the results of which will be presented here.