From about the late first century BCE, a stone-vessel industry emerged in ancient Palestine which produced a unique corpus of chalkstone vessels whose distribution is virtually limited to Jewish sites. Many scholars link the use of these vessels with Jewish purity practices. In this lecture, Dr Dennis Mizzi will present an overview of ritual purity in ancient Judaism while also exploring the use of chalkstone vessels within this framework. In addition, Dr Mizzi will present preliminary results from the recent excavation of a stone-vessel workshop at ‘Einot Amitai (near Nazareth).