In 2006, excavations in the South Region of the urban area of Chersonesos, near the large cistern, involved the examination of Middle and Late Byzantine structures not excavated in previous seasons and on the exploration of earlier layers of occupation in the area of the Byzantine residential block on which the project has focused since 2001. Evidence for the earliest occupation of the area was uncovered in 2006; it consisted of a sealed deposit of ceramics that could be dated to the period between the end of the 4th c. BC and the later 3rd c. BC. Although pottery and a monumental pavement found in previous seasons indicates that the area was in use in the Roman (1st-4th c. AD) period, the next phase represented clearly in the record involves pits and cuts in bedrock that seem to be associated with an Early Byzantine (5th-7th c. AD) industrial facility. Somewhat later in the Early Byzantine period, these facilities were abandoned and replaced with residential buildings. One of these buildings, with two large square rooms and a hearth, had been excavated in 2005. In 2006, we uncovered another more modest house, a sunken-floor building constructed in a pit originally meant to hold several very large pithoi. This house had been abandoned very suddenly: a cookpot full of animal bones had been left on its beaten-earth floor. New evidence for a Middle Byzantine (7th-early 13th c. AD) cemetery in the area was uncovered beneath a chapel belonging to the final-phase block. Several burials just over bedrock below the chapel floor had been cut or disturbed by the built tombs inside the chapel, and a more carefully constructed tomb in the area of the main street seems to belong to the same period (like a plastered masonry tomb found under one of the chapel walls in 2005). To a period perhaps slightly later than the burials date several cellars or sunken-floor buildings cut into bedrock along the side-street that bounds the block to the east. One of these cellars was excavated in 2006; it had been filled in during the construction of the last-phase buildings with what appears to be destruction debris dating to the 10th c. or early 11th c. AD. The final phase of activity in the block began in the late 11th or 12th c. AD. It involved the construction of three residential, commercial, and industrial complexes that occupy the part of the block excavated since 2001. Most of the remains of those complexes were investigated in previous seasons, but the 2006 season saw the excavation of the remaining courtyard surfaces and the creation of a sondage in the side street, which produced a sequence of activity stretching from the Hellenistic period to the creation of a box-drain and two street surfaces connected with the final phase of occupation of the block in the 12th-13th centuries. In addition, the excavation of the beaten-earth floor of a room added after the initial phase of construction confirmed that the final-phase structure of the block had been modified at least once in the later 12th or early 13th c. AD. – Adam Rabinowitz