ABSTRACT
In late 1930, a man described in the unpublished convent archive as a visiting Belgian priest, Alphonse Duhot, and Abbe Benoit undertook the first excavation at the site by anyone other than the nuns themselves. Perhaps prompted by Bagatti’s dismissal of the site as of no religious significance, between 1936 and 1964, Henri Senes, a Jesuit priest from Marseille based in the Pontifical Biblical Institute at Jerusalem, where he had been one of the first two staff, began investigating and recording the site in a systematic fashion. Senes, who had been an architect before entering religious life, applied his skills as a surveyor and draughtsman to this task, producing numerous detailed drawings. Senes’s excavations seem to have prompted Mere Perinet to undertake some investigations of her own. This was the same nun who had apparently independently found the supposedly Hellenistic sherd in the Chambre Obscure.
