[3][1] Victor Guérin visited the site in 1870, writing that “[...] on the foothills I found the remains of a wall built of large undressed boulders, which encircled the whole place.

Inside this there are rock-hewn cisterns, some collapsed structures and the foundations of a tower, 15 m long and 12 m wide.”[1] The SWP surveyors visited in 1872 and reported they had seen "the remains of a town and of a square building, perhaps a fort, on the top of the mound or tell".

In a report published in 1972, they noted the wall and stated that the inside space measured 120 m by 80 m.[6] Zertal visited the site in 1979 as part of the Manasseh Hill Country Survey.

[1] A burial cave was excavated in 1985 on behalf of the Staff Officer for Archaeology of the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria on the terraced western slopes of the hill as part of the approval of construction plans in nearby Meithalun.

[7] A local tradition brought by the Survey of Western Palestine linked Khirbet Kheibar to “a Jewish King, who is said by the peasantry to have lived in Sanur.

However, based on early Islamic Arab sources from the 7th up to the 9th century such as al-Waqidi which offer evidence that Jews expelled from Khaybar lived in Jericho, it is possible that some of them later migrated north to the area around Sanur and settled at the site.