completely quashed, and surviving Samaritans were mostly enslaved or exiled. In 533 Justinian had a castle constructed on Mount Gerizim to protect the church from raids by the few disgruntled Samaritans left in the area. Archaeology Excavations at the site were initiated in 1983 and continued until 2006 and yielded tens of thousands of finds. Remnants found there identified that a Samaritan temple existed atop Mount Gerizim by the mid-5th century BC, and that it was eventually destroyed and rebuilt in the early 2nd century BC, only to be destroyed again in 111–110 BCE by Jewish forces under the orders of the Hasmonean leader John Hyrcanus. The archeological finds have shown that the precincts of the Samaritan temple, not including its gates, measured 96 meters x 98 meters. Inside this perimeter, thousands of pottery vessels and burned bones of animal sacrifices – sheep, goats, cattle and doves – were found, as well as many stones with inscriptions containing the Tetragrammaton (the name of God). In 475 CE, a Christian church was built on the Mount's summit. As a result of the fortified church and the previous Samaritan temple, extensive ruins still exist at the somewhat plateau-like top of Gerizim. The line of the wall around the church can easily be seen, as can portions of the former castle, and initial archaeological study of the site postulated that the castle built by Justinian had utilized stones from an earlier structure on the site, probably the Samaritan temple. In the centre of the plateau is a smooth surface, containing a hollow. The excavation, initiated when the site was in the possession of Jordan and continued under Israeli rule, uncovered Corinthian columns, a large rectangular platform 215 ft by 145 ft (65m by 44m) surrounded by 6 ft (2m) thick and 30 ft (9m) high walls, and a 25 ft (8m) wide staircase leading down from the platform to a marbled esplanade. The complex also has a series of cisterns in which Late Roman ceramics were found. These discoveries, now named "Structure A", have been dated to the time of Hadrian, due to numismatics and external literary evidence. Underneath these remains were found a large stone structure built on top of the bedrock. This structure, now known as "Structure B", nearly half cubic (21m by 20m in width and length, and 8.5m high), consists almost entirely of unhewn limestone slabs, fitted together without