Pottery from the Herodian and earlier periods of Caesarea Maritima is a rarity. Most of the excavation at the site has been in Late Roman, Byzantine, and later periods; only in one portion of the excavations has any concentration of earlier material been found, in the area to the north of the Crusader city and immediately south of the walls discovered in 1962 by the Italian Archaeological Mission. Here, in the early 1960s, Israeli archaeologists discovered pottery of "a typical Hellenistic context" (Avi-Yonah and Negev 1963: 147). In 1976 and 1978 the Joint Expedition in its Field G discovered small but consistent quantities of Hellenistic and Early Roman pottery sherds and coins in the lowest levels of its trenches, which were to the north of the Israeli excavations. Most of the material represented here dates from the last two centuries B.C. An exception is No. 1, which dates from the late 4th century B.c., and as such is not only an anomaly but the earliest clearly datable object from the Caesarea excavations. Yet numismatic evidence seems to support a date of early in the 2nd century B.c. for the beginnings of occupation of the site. The 1978 excavations produced a number of Hellenistic coins, all of which date from no earlier than the 2nd century B.C. Especially noteworthy is C78-323, dating to between 175 and 162 B.c., the earliest coin yet found at Caesarea. Other Hellenistic coins of note include C78-58, C78-322, and C78-325, all from the 2nd century B.c. It will be seen that the pottery evidence agrees with the numismatic evidence in suggesting an early-2nd-century B.c. date for the earliest Hellenistic material at Caesarea.