Tall Hisban and the Identification of Heshbon

The Andrews University expedition began excavating Tall Hisban in 1968 partly to test its traditional identification with biblical Heshbon. Early campaigns expected a Late Bronze city associated with Sihon but instead exposed later Iron Age and classical remains. Rather than ending the project, the surprising result broadened it into the Madaba Plains Project and a long study of settlement, food systems, environment, pilgrimage, and Islamic rural life. Continued excavation and community archaeology revealed more than twenty occupational layers and made the absence of the expected horizon an important historical finding.

Tall Hisban is a multilayered mound containing walls, houses, reservoirs, cisterns, fortifications, churches, agricultural installations, tombs, and later Islamic structures. Iron Age ceramics and architecture establish early occupation, while Hellenistic and Roman defenses mark a strategically important center. Byzantine mosaics and ecclesiastical buildings document Christian community life, and medieval and Ottoman phases reveal continued use of the plateau. Because later builders repeatedly cut, reused, and terraced earlier remains, the mound must be read as a changing landscape rather than a single biblical city preserved intact.

The published sequence contains Iron Age material but lacks the substantial Late Bronze urban horizon once expected for the capital of Sihon. That gap has encouraged several possibilities: biblical Heshbon may lie at a neighboring tell, the name may have denoted a district, occupation may have been less archaeologically visible, or textual chronology may differ from older reconstructions. In later periods the site clearly became important within the Ammonite, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic landscapes. Name continuity alone cannot determine which phase a text describes.