Mount Gerizim is the centre of Samaritan religion. The community holds it to be the place God chose, its Torah names the mountain where the Masoretic text does not, the Passover sacrifice is performed on it, and the village of Kiryat Luza sits on its slope. It is also an archaeological site, and excavation there has produced a substantial body of material bearing directly on the community history.
The finds include the remains of a sacred precinct on the mountain and a large settlement around it, and, importantly for this alphabet, a considerable number of inscriptions. They are written in Aramaic and in the older Hebrew letters, they are mostly short dedicatory texts, and they belong to the period when the sanctuary was in use. For a script otherwise thinly attested between the Iron Age epigraphy and the surviving manuscripts, that is valuable evidence, and it lands in exactly the place where the written record is weakest.
It also settles a question of continuity in the most tangible way available. The letterforms in the ground on Gerizim, the letterforms in the scrolls kept at Nablus and the letterforms taught in the village school on the same mountain are one script, in one place, over a very long time. Excavation reports are not usually able to say that about anything. Here the excavated inscriptions and the living community are separated by a walk rather than by a discipline.