The Ha-Ro‘a site or Hurvat Ha-Ro‘a is an archaeological site in the Negev Mountains near the Ha-Ro‘a stream about 5 kilometers from Sde Boker. The site is located on a hill dominating an ancient road at a height of 550 meters above sea level. Further down the road to the south you can find a parallel site called Horvat Halukim. In 1965, the shepherd site was surveyed for the first time by a survey team led by Rudolf Cohen, and in the same year an excavation was conducted at the site together with Midrash Sde Boker. 1967 excavated the site again on behalf of the Antiquities and Museums Division which later became the Antiquities Authority.

The site, like other sites in the Negev Mountains, is the site of a settlement from the Iron Age, and is part of the chain of Israeli citadels in the Negev, citadels attributed to the Kingdom of Judah.

The site was a fortress as well as smaller residential sites. The citadel is large and has an elliptical shape. The longest diameter is 50 meters and the shortest diameter is 42 meters. The citadel is built in such a way that its outer wall consists of rooms that form a wall of enclosures. The walls are made of roughly hewn flint stones, and are about half a meter thick. They were preserved to a height of about a meter. In the enclosure wall there are about 17 rooms with an average size of about 2.5 meters and their length ranges from 5 to 10 meters. According to the findings in the rooms, the excavator of the site speculates that they were used as the rooms of the soldiers who served in the citadel, which protected the road that passed through the area.

Apart from the citadel, another 12 buildings were surveyed and excavated, most of which have between one and four rooms. One building that has five spaces stands out. The building was probably built in the four-room house plan common throughout the country during the Iron Age, but an additional room was added to this building. Rudolf Cohen chose a theory that says that those houses were used as the residences of the regional commander to describe the structure, which is different from the rest of the settlement’s buildings.

Cohen, R. (1970). Atar Haro’a/Site of the Shepherd. Atiqot: Hebrew Series, 6-24