Where was Beersheba, the well of Abraham?

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Beersheba lay in the northern Negev, on the edge of the desert, where wells along a broad wadi allowed settled life; the town of the kings of Judah is Tel Beer Sheva, a mound about 4 km east of the modern city of Beersheba in Israel, and the map point stands on it. It is about 70 km south-south-west of Jerusalem and 40 km south-west of Hebron in a straight line. The name is explained in Genesis as “well of the oath”; the Hebrew can also mean “well of seven”. The patriarchs' stories turn on its wells. Abraham gave Abimelech seven ewe lambs as witness that he had dug a well, “Wherefore he called that place Beer-sheba; because there they sware both of them”, and he “planted a grove in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God”. Isaac's servants found water there, “therefore the name of the city is Beer-sheba unto this day”. “Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran”, and in old age he offered sacrifices there on his way down to Egypt. Later Elijah, fleeing from Jezebel, “came to Beer-sheba, which belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there” before going on into the desert. Yohanan Aharoni's excavations from 1969 showed that the mound was first settled only early in the Iron Age, long after the usual dates for the patriarchs; from about the tenth century BC (the date is disputed) it was a small planned town of Judah with a wall, a gate and a large well outside it, burned at the end of the eighth century. So the wells of Genesis are sought in the valley rather than on the mound, and in the old quarter of the modern city a well is shown as Abraham's. The phrase “from Dan to Beersheba”, the whole land from north to south, is the subject of a separate question.