Early Christian Pilgrimage Site Excavated in Israel
Archaeologists have unveiled pilgrims’ lamps and other finds from the ”tomb of Salome”, a burial site named after a woman said to have assisted at the birth of Christ.
Inscriptions engraved in stone in ancient Greek including the name of Salome, inside a burial chamber west of Jerusalem.
The tomb was discovered by grave robbers in what is now Tel Lachish national park, west of Jerusalem, in the 1980s.
Subsequent excavations by archaeologists have uncovered a Jewish burial chamber dating back to the Roman period that was taken over by a Christian chapel in the Byzantine era and was still drawing worshippers into the early Islamic period.
An inscription found on the walls of the grotto led the excavation team to conclude it was dedicated to Salome, a figure associated with the birth of Jesus in Eastern Orthodox tradition.
“In the cave, we found tonnes of inscriptions in ancient Greek and Syriac,” said the excavation director, Zvi Firer.
“One of the beautiful inscriptions is the name Salome … “Because of this inscription, we understand this is the cave of holy Salome.”
One of the clay lamps was discovered during the excavations.
Salome’s role as an assistant to the midwife at Christ’s birth is recounted in the Gospel of James, a text dropped from the versions of the New Testament used by most western churches.
“The cult of Salome … belongs to a broader phenomenon, whereby the fifth-century Christian pilgrims encountered and sanctified Jewish sites,” the excavation team said.
Outside the grotto, the team found the remains of a colonnaded forecourt spanning 350 sq metres (3,750 sq ft), suggesting Salome was then a revered figure.
A man shines a light in a cave at the site.
Shops selling clay lamps and other items intended for pilgrims were found around the courtyard, dating from as late as the ninth century, 200 years after the Muslim conquest.
“It is interesting that some of the inscriptions were inscribed in Arabic, whilst the Christian believers continued to pray at the site,” the team said.
Artifacts Recovered from Franklin Expedition Shipwreck
A Parks Canada underwater archaeologist works on the excavation of a furniture drawer in an officer’s cabin from the lower deck of the wreck of the HMS Erebus during a dive in this September 2022 handout photo in the Northwest Passage.
Eleven meters below the surface of the Northwest Passage, deep within the wreck of one of Capt. John Franklin’s doomed ships, something caught the eye of diver Ryan Harris.
Harris was in the middle of the 2022 field season on the wreck of HMS Erebus. The team had been hauling dozens of artifacts to the surface — elaborate table settings, a lieutenant’s epaulets still in their case, a lens from someone’s eyeglasses.
But this, sitting within the steward’s pantry, was something else.
“It’s probably the most remarkable find of the summer,” said Harris, one of the Parks Canada team of archaeologist divers who have been excavating Franklin’s two lost ships since they were found under the Arctic seas.
“We came across a folio — a leather book cover, beautifully embossed — with pages inside. It actually has the feather quill pen still tucked inside the cover like a journal that you might write in and put on your bedside table before turning in.”
Maybe it’s just an inventory of stores or someone’s laundry list. It was found in the pantry. Or maybe it’s more.
“We’re quite excited at the tantalizing possibility that this artifact might have written materials inside,” Harris said. “It’s being analyzed in the lab now.”
Parks Canada tents and gear are shown at the HMS Erebus ice camp in the Northwest Passage in April.
Erebus and HMS Terror set out from England in 1845. Commander Sir John Franklin and his 129 men never returned. More than 30 expeditions tried to find them. A few artifacts, graves and ghastly tales of cannibalism is all they uncovered. But with a blend of Inuit oral history and systematic, high-tech surveys, Erebus was found in 2014, just off the northwest coast of King William Island in Nunavut and Terror two years later. The discoveries made headlines around the world.
56 dives in 11 days
Since then, Parks Canada has been working to understand what is down there and what light it could shed on a story that has become part of Canadian lore. Divers didn’t visit Terror in 2022. That vessel, down twice as deep as Erebus, is deemed more secure and the archaeologists wanted to excavate the more vulnerable wreck first.
Parks Canada archaeologists sit at the dive control console as the Deep Trekker ROV is seen in the diving hole at the HMS Erebus ice camp in the Northwest Passage in April.
After two seasons lost because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a busy summer. Field seasons in the Arctic are brief. The divers and conservators had just 11 days moored over the site of the wreck with their tender barge and the RV David Thompson, Parks Canada’s 29-meter research ship.
But over that time the team squeezed in 56 dives. Each dive lasted about two hours — possible only because the divers used suits heated by warm water pumped from the surface.
Harris said the ship seems to have been left in good order. Doors and drawers were closed, everything squared away. A total of 275 artifacts were recovered. The steward’s pantry was a main focus of the summer and much of what was recovered from there is tableware — stoneware plates, platters and serving dishes.
Painstaking work
The divers also began excavating the officers’ cabins. In the one that would have been occupied by 2nd Lt. Henry Thomas Dundas le Vesconte, whom Franklin charged with map-making, they found a green box that at first looked like a book.
“My partner and I realized that it’s not a book at all,” Harris said. “It’s actually a set of drafting implements — the professional tools of the trade for a ship’s officer. It’s quite possible these are the tools used to map their way through the Northwest Passage, which I think is fantastic.”
Jonathan Moore, a Parks Canada underwater archaeologist, observes a washing basin and an officer’s bedplace on the lower deck of the wreck of the HMS Erebus in September of 2022.
Divers use a vacuum dredge to clear away much of the accumulated sediment. The work, however, remains slow, painstaking, and delicate. The leather folio was excavated bit by bit with a spoon.
On one dive, Harris was handling the dredge when he suddenly stopped.
“I started to see what looked like a piece of paper almost fluttering in the movements of the water. This is very, very delicate.”
That paper surfaced in a Ziploc bag and is now being analyzed.
There are years of work to do, Harris said. Divers have only poked their masks into a few square meters of a wreck 36 meters long, nine metres wide and five metres deep.
‘A remarkable thing to experience’
Much remains in the officers’ cabins. The sailors’ chests, which held their personal belongings, are still mysterious. Divers haven’t even entered the bottom deck. And then there’s Terror.
“There’s so much material in either of these ships,” Harris said.
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, shown in the Illustrated London News published on May 24, 1845, left England that year under the command of Sir John Franklin and in the search of the Northwest Passage.
Retrieving it from the icy deeps is only part of the job. The artifacts have to be conserved, studied, and analyzed at Parks Canada’s lab in Ottawa, where this summer’s haul now sits. Harris has dived into the wreck many times and acknowledges he gets focused on the task at hand. Nothing, after all, will ever match his first sight of Erebus.
“I couldn’t see where the wreck was because the visibility was poor,” he recalled. “I had to pick a direction and go, and then I saw the first plank lying on the sea floor.
“I followed it to hand over hand until all of a sudden, out of the gloom, there it looms. It’s towering over the top of you, the shadow of this enormous bulk of shipwreck lying proud on the sea floor.”
But the thrill never entirely fades.
“You’re taken with this feeling that you’re in this hallowed space. Not just in view of history, but because here’s where human beings were confronted with their own mortality. It’s a remarkable thing to experience.”
An extremely Rare Half-Shekel Coin From Year Three of the Great Revolt discovered
Recent excavations by archaeologists from the Hebrew University in the Ophel area south of the Temple Mount uncovered the remains of a monumental public building from the Second Temple period that was destroyed in 70 CE.
Numerous Jewish coins, the majority of which were bronze, from the Great Revolt (66-70 CE) were discovered in the destruction layer. This collection also contained a particularly uncommon and rare discovery: a silver coin with a half-shekel denomination that dates to around 69/70 CE.
The Great Revolt was the first of several uprisings against the Roman Empire by the Jewish population of Judea.
The revolt was in response to the Romans’ increasing religious tensions and high taxation, which resulted in the looting of the Second Temple and the arrest of senior Jewish political and religious figures.
A large-scale rebellion overran the Roman garrison in Judea, forcing the pro-Roman King Herod Agrippa II to abandon Jerusalem.
A coin discovered in the ruins of a Second Temple-era building was most likely used to pay an annual tax for worship at the site; most coins of this type are bronze.
The dig was carried out by a team from the Hebrew University, led by Prof. Uzi Leibner of the Institute of Archaeology, in partnership with the Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmond, Oklahoma, and with the support of the East Jerusalem Development Company, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
The rare coin was cleaned at the conservation laboratory of the Institute of Archaeology and identified by Dr. Yoav Farhi, the team’s numismatic expert and curator of the Kadman Numismatic Pavilion at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.
The Ophel archeological site.
“This is the third coin of this type found in excavations in Jerusalem, and one of the few ever found in archeological excavations,” said the researchers.
During the Great Revolt against Rome, the Jews in Jerusalem minted bronze and silver coins. Most of the silver coins featured a goblet on one side, with ancient Hebrew script above it noting the year of the Revolt.
Depending on its denomination, the coins also included an inscription around the border noting either, “Israel Shekel,” “Half-Shekel,” or “Quarter-Shekel.” The other side of these coins showcased a branch with three pomegranates, surrounded by an inscription in ancient Hebrew script, “Holy Jerusalem.”
Throughout the Roman era the authority to produce silver coins was reserved solely for the emperor. During the Revolt, the minting of coins, especially those made of silver, was a political statement and an expression of national liberation from Roman rule by the Jewish rebels.
Indeed, throughout the Roman period leading up to the Great Revolt, no silver coins were minted by Jews, not even during the rule of King Herod the Great.
According to the researchers, half-shekel coins (which had an average weight of 7 grams) were also used to pay the “half-shekel” tax to the Temple, contributed annually by every Jewish adult male to help cover the costs of worship.
Dr. Farhi explained, “Until the revolt, it was customary to pay the half-shekel tax using good-quality silver coins minted in Tyre in Lebanon, known as ‘Tyrean shekels’ or ‘Tyrean half-shekels.’ These coins held the image of Herakles-Melqart, the principal deity of Tyre, and on the reverse they featured an eagle surrounded by a Greek inscription, ‘Tyre the holy and city of refuge.’ Thus, the silver coins produced by the rebels were intended to also serve as a replacement for the Tyrean coins, by using more appropriate inscriptions and replacing images (forbidden by the Second Commandment) with symbols.
The silver coins from the Great Revolt were the first and the last in ancient times to bear the title ‘shekel.’ The next time this name was used was in 1980, on Israeli Shekel coins produced by the Bank of Israel.”
The precious silver coins are thought to have been minted inside the Temple complex, according to a Monday statement from the Armstrong Institute.
Attila The Hun May Have Raided The Roman Empire Because Of Drought
Attila the Hun played a massive role in the Roman Empire’s downfall.
Attila the Hun is one of history’s most notorious warlords – yet while he has traditionally been cast as a bloodthirsty barbarian motivated only by a lust for gold, new research suggests that his constant attacks on the Roman Empire may have been driven by drought.
After analyzing 2,000 years’ worth of tree-ring data, the study authors found that many of Attila’s most epic raids occurred during extremely dry years, and may therefore have represented an attempt to mitigate the effects of an unstable climate.
Though the origins of the Huns remain uncertain, they are believed to have crossed into Eastern Europe from Central Asia sometime around 370 CE, before settling on the Great Hungarian Plain to the east of the River Danube.
Following Attila’s rise to power in 434 CE, the Huns increasingly pillaged the eastern flank of the Roman Empire, and are largely credited with expediting the fall of Rome.
“Historical sources tell us that Roman and Hun diplomacy was extremely complex,” explained study author Dr Susanne Hakenbeck in a statement. “Initially it involved mutually beneficial arrangements, resulting in Hun elites gaining access to vast amounts of gold.
This system of collaboration broke down in the 440s, leading to regular raids of Roman lands and increasing demands for gold.”
However, the researchers say that this diplomatic breakdown alone may not explain Attila’s military incursions, and point out that the period coincided with a series of droughts.
Using stable carbon and oxygen isotope data from oak tree rings, the study authors reconstructed the Central European hydroclimate and found that the most devastating Hun raids of 447, 451, and 452 all occurred during extremely dry years.
“Tree ring data gives us an amazing opportunity to link climatic conditions to human activity on a year-by-year basis,” said study author Professor Ulf Büntgen. “We found that periods of drought recorded in biochemical signals in tree-rings coincided with an intensification of raiding activity in the region.”
Based on these findings, the researchers write that “the Huns’ apparently inexplicable violence may have been one strategy for coping with climatic extremes within a wider context of the social and economic changes that occurred at the time.”
This assumption is strengthened by previous isotopic analyses of fifth-century Hunnic skeletons, which revealed sudden changes in diet that may reflect the various strategies employed by the Huns in response to an uncertain climate.
The authors speculate that some of the group’s raids may have been launched to secure food and livestock, although they concede that more evidence is required to support this theory.
They also say that Attila’s demands that the Romans hand over an extensive strip of territory flanking the Danube might have been a mitigating strategy, as land in a floodplain would have provided greater food security in times of drought.
Furthermore, an unstable climate may have led to major social restructuring within Hun communities, as herders abandoned their flocks to become raiders.
The emergence of these war parties would then have led to a new network of allegiances between warlords, with Attila at the top of the hierarchy.
Such alliances would probably have been maintained with gold subsidies, which may explain Attila’s increasing demands for Roman gold.
“Climate-induced economic disruption may have required Attila and others of high rank to extract gold from the Roman provinces to keep war bands and maintain inter-elite loyalties,” explains Hakenbeck.
Fortunately for the Romans, Attila died suddenly in 453 after choking on his own blood following a nosebleed, and the Huns faded away shortly after. However, the damage they had already inflicted proved cataclysmic for the Roman Empire, highlighting the impact that climate can have on even the mightiest of civilizations.
Tiny flakes tell a story of tool use 300,000 years ago
Tübingen University and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment team analyze flint chips found in Schöningen, Lower Saxony.
Overview of the flint chips from Schöningen, which were created as “waste” during the re-sharpening of knife-like tools. They are sorted by size in millimeters. In the middle a scale of 3cm.
When prehistoric people re-sharpened cutting tools 300,000 years ago, they dropped tiny chips of flint – which today yield evidence of how the wood was processed by early humans.
The small flint flakes were discovered at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen, Lower Saxony. Now, a multidisciplinary team led by the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) in Tübingen has analyzed this very old material for the information it can provide. The study has been published in Scientific Reports.
The 57 small stone chips and three bone implements for re-sharpening stone tools were discovered around the skeleton of a Eurasian straight-tusked elephant that had died on the shore of a lake about 300,000 years ago.
“We can prove, among other things, from these finds that people – probably Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals – were in the vicinity of the elephant carcass,” says Dr. Jordi Serangeli, director of the archaeological excavations in Schöningen. “This site is located about two meters below the famous site of the world’s oldest spears,” he adds.
A snapshot of Stone Age life
Tübingen researcher Flavia Venditti, the study’s lead author, says the story of the Stone Age is told mainly via the study of objects worked by our ancestors.
“One is inclined to believe that large tools such as knives, scrapers and points are more significant than simple flakes, especially when they are small and really just a byproduct of tool production.
But even microscopic stone chips, in the context of the overall evidence, can tell us a lot about the way of life of our ancestors,” she says.
This is how the scene might have played out when people discovered the straight-tusked elephant’s carcass 300,000 years ago in what is now Schöningen. They brought their tools with them.
Most of the fragments studied were smaller than one centimeter, Venditti reports. “Through a multidisciplinary approach that included technological and spatial analysis, the study of residues and signs of use, and methods of experimental archaeology, we were able to obtain more of the Stone Age story from these stone chips,” Venditti says. “The small flakes come from knife-like tools, they were knocked off during re-sharpening.” The chips fell to the ground, where they stayed when the people moved on with their tools, she said.
Evidence of woodworking
Early human – Homo heidelbergensis – working wood with the help of a scraping tool that was later re-sharpened on the spot of the elephant 300,000 years ago in what is now Schöningen.
Fifteen pieces showed signs of use typical of working fresh wood.
“Microscopic wood residues remained attached to what had been the tool edges,” Venditti says. In addition, micro use-wear on a sharp-edged natural flint fragment proved that people used it to cut fresh animal tissue. “Probably this flint was used in the butchering of the elephant,” she says.
These results are further evidence of the combined use of stone, bone, and plant technologies 300,000 years ago, as has been documented several times in Schöningen, Venditti says.
Professor Nicholas Conard from Tübingen and head of the Schöningen research project emphasizes that “this study shows how detailed analyses of traces of use and microresidues can provide information from small artifacts that are often ignored.
This is the first study to produce such comprehensive results from 300,000 years old re-sharpening flakes.
The prerequisite for this kind of research is that the artifacts are handled with extreme care from excavation throughout the analyses.”
The archaeological excavation at the Paleolithic sites in Schöningen and the scientific investigation are a long-term project of the University of Tübingen in cooperation with the Senckenberg Nature Research Society and the State Heritage Office of Lower Saxony. The project is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture in Hanover.
A princely tomb discovered in the infrastructure project of the A7 Ploieşti-Buzău highway in Romania
An impressive archaeological discovery took place on the Ploiești-Buzău section of the Moldova Highway. The excavations uncovered a princely tomb, most likely belonging to a warrior from the migration period.
The discovery of the warrior princely tomb, which contains various weapons and ornaments, some of which are made of gold, was announced by the national highway company CNAIR.
During the feasibility study for the A7 highway, four archaeological sites were discovered on the Ploiești-Buzău lot. Because not all expropriations had taken place at the time, archaeological research continued after the work began, when four other sites were identified.
In the case of the infrastructure project of the A7 Ploiești-Buzău motorway, archaeologists were limited in their investigations because some portions of the route were not expropriated, which led to the impossibility of accessing the entire land, CNAIR explained.
“Even in this situation, on lot 1 of the mentioned project, on approximately 14 of the 21 km, the intrusive archaeological diagnosis could be carried out during the feasibility study phase, and four archaeological sites were identified,” the company said, adding that, later on, four other sites were found.
Archaeological research at one of these sites led to the discovery of the princely tomb.
The archaeological research is carried out by specialists from the “Vasile Pârvan” Institute of Archeology in Bucharest who tried, in extremely difficult conditions from the point of view of the weather, to collect all the information that this type of discovery provides.
Experts consider this warrior tomb dating back 4 or 5 AD centuries to be an outstanding archaeological discovery.
The tomb amazes with its varied and rich inventory, from elaborately crafted and decorated weapons to gold ornaments for both the deceased and the horse in which he was buried.
In the tomb was also discovered the horse next to which the warrior was buried, weapons, but also ornaments. It is, in total, more than 120 pieces, most of them in gold, inlaid with precious stones.
After the archaeological research, the works will be presented to the public in a special exhibition.
The Egyptian archaeological mission affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities has been working at Tell al-Deir ruins in the new city of Damietta.
Together they discovered 20 tombs dating back to the Late Period of ancient Egypt, while completing the excavation work it is conducting at the site, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, said.
He also pointed out the importance of this discovery in rewriting the history of Damietta Governorate.
He added that the discovered tombs varied between tombs made of mud bricks and simple pits.
The mud brick tombs may date back to the Sawi era, specifically the 26th Dynasty, as the architectural planning of the discovery tombs was a widespread and well-known model in the late period.
There are also the technical features and pottery vessels discovered inside it, Ayman Ashmawy, head of the Egyptian antiquities sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.
The mission also discovered golden chips that covered the remains of human burials.
These are embodying the deities Isis, Heqet, and Bastet, as well as the embodiment of the protective eye of Horus (Udjat), and Horus in the form of a falcon while spreading his wings.
Many funerary amulets of different shapes, sizes, and stones, such as scarabs, the headrest, the two feathers of Amun, and many deities: including Isis, Nephthys, Djehuty, and Taweret, were also discovered, Qotb Fawzy, head of the Central Department of Antiquities of Lower Egypt and Sinai and head of the archaeological mission, stated.
The miniature models of canopic vessels for preserving the viscera of the deceased during the mummification process, and statues of the four sons of Horus were also found.
The mission is continuing its excavation work at the site in order to uncover the secrets of the Tell Al-Deir necropolis, Reda Salih, Director of the Damietta Antiquities District, said.
In previous seasons the mission uncovered many burial customs and methods of successive civilizations on the land of Egypt in the Greco-Roman era, at Tel Al-Deir.
Dyed Cotton Fibers Found at Neolithic Village Site in Israel
Around 7,000 years ago, somebody arrived in a prehistoric village in today’s northern Israel with a luxurious novelty: cotton.
Excavation work at the site where the cotton fibers were found.
Cotton was not known to the earliest civilizations rising in the Near East because it isn’t indigenous to the region, and where and when it was first domesticated remains a mystery. But now traces of this alien plant with its exquisitely soft bolls have been detected in Tel Tsaf.
This is the earliest trace of cotton found in the Near East to date by centuries, the researchers say. They believe it originated in the Indus Valley, though do not rule out an African origin.
How did cotton get to Tel Tsaf 7,000 years ago from the Indus Valley (or North Africa)? By trading, suggest Li Liu of Stanford University, Maureece Levin of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Florian Klimscha of the Lower Saxony State Museum (Hannover, Germany) and Danny Rosenberg of the University of Haifa, writing in Frontiers in Plant Science.
Excavation work at the site where the cotton fibers were found.
Good times in the Late Neolithic
Tel Tsaf contains the ruins of a village that arose about 7,300 to 7,200 years ago and would thrive for about 500 years, after which it was deserted for reasons that remain unknown. That in itself is quite the mystery given the abundance of its environs in the central Jordan Valley, south of the Sea of Galilee, Rosenberg notes. But for its time, this had been some settlement.
The wonders found during half a century of excavation there include the most ancient copper object in this part of the Middle East (there’s somewhat older in Iraq), a clay model of a grain silo – possibly indicating ritual involving food cultivation and storage – and a stamped sealing from around 7,000 years ago. This all suggests, the archaeologists surmise, that Tel Tsaf was an extraordinarily wealthy place as Late Neolithic settlements went.
7,000-yeAr-old seal stamp
Earliest copper artifact in the Middle East
Now Liu, Rosenberg and colleagues have detected cotton microfibers, at least some of which were dyed, from 7,000 years ago. This may provide further indication of trading relationships at the cusp of the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Early Chalcolithic in the valley.
It bears adding that the earliest cotton reported previously was in Dhuweila, eastern Jordan, and dates to centuries later – sometime between 6,450 years ago to around 5,000 years ago.
To be clear, it isn’t that humans strolled around in the altogether with their bits flapping in the breeze until discovering the delights of cotton. The thinking, says Rosenberg, is that the earliest garb was animal skins, whether worn to preserve modesty, for reasons of status, for warmth or for some other reason.
But hmo-kind discovered plant fibers at least tens of thousands of years ago. In 2020, archaeologists found no less than three-ply cord in a Neanderthal context in France, taking the crown from 23,000-year-old string found in Ohalo, Israel. What the Neanderthals or humans from Ohalo were doing with string, we do not know. However, the archaeologists note that the ability to create cord is the prerequisite for a host of potential developments, including textile weaving.
Textiles do not preserve well in the archaeological record, to put it mildly. Yet moving on from the Ohalo cord, evidence of early weaving pops up here and there – including an extremely complex woven basket found in a cave in the Judean Desert from 10,500 years ago. Material made of oak bast (the innards of bark), meanwhile, was found in Çatalhöyük, Turkey, from 8,500 years ago.
10,500-year-old basket found in Judean Desert, buried in the floor of a cave
In short, before cotton, people in the region were using bast and flax fibers. And now Liu, Rosenberg and the team report on cotton in Tel Tsaf – definitely from afar, and seemingly before the plant had even been domesticated. And it was dyed, to boot.
What colors were the fibers tinted, and can they speak to Neolithic tastes? They cannot. Rosenberg stresses that the sample of fibers from Tel Tsaf is small (123 microfibers in total), and 16 being observed to be cotton in shades of blue, three pink, one purple, one green and three brown/black means precisely nothing about their preferences. What it does mean, the professor qualifies, is that these late prehistoric peoples were not just making textiles and fibers – they were doing further manipulation and coloring their cloths.
By the way, the most frequently used fiber in ancient Tel Tsaf was bast, and they also used flax and jute, the archaeologists report.
Olive pits found at Tel Tsaf
A story from Pakistan
Let us move onto the cotton’s origin. Why couldn’t the cotton fibers of Tel Tsaf be local? And why do they think it’s Pakistan, not North Africa?
It isn’t likely to have been grown locally because cotton is happiest in tropical and subtropical regions with ample water. It apparently didn’t grow in prehistoric Israel, and the thinking is that like the “invention” of agriculture itself – the cultivation of cotton arose independently around the world, including in the Indus Valley and North Africa. “But cultivation in North Africa was later,” Rosenberg explains.
The earliest archaeological evidence of cotton’s use is in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period at the Mehrgarh burial site in central Balochistan, Pakistan. Cotton threads were used to string copper beads about 8,500 to 7,500 years ago. It bears clarifying that the earliest known cotton fabric is a tiny fragment of actual cloth (albeit stuck to the lid of a silver vase), which was discovered at Mohenjo-daro, also Pakistan, from 5,000 to 4,750 years ago.
So, cotton was known in some context in prehistoric Pakistan at the time of its appearance in Tel Tsaf, Rosenberg says.
What cotton? Wild cotton. The plant apparently wouldn’t be domesticated for at least 2,000 years more, he explains. “Based primarily on evidence from seeds, domestication is thought to have occurred during the time of the Harappan civilization (2600-1900 B.C.E.),” the authors write.
And how might the wild cotton have been used, aside from making threads to string crude copper beads? Weaving textiles is a reasonable assumption, because cotton isn’t the stuff for baskets. As for another clothing source staple, the sheep did join our human story about 10,000 years ago, in parallel with the start of the Neolithic Revolution. However, the archaeological record of perishables is spotty at best and the earliest recognition of the charms of wool as opposed to mutton stew is not clear. Some think wool-shearing and related technology arose in the Chalcolithic; some think that in Mesopotamia it began as much as 9,000 years ago.
Looking toward Jordan from Tel Tsaf.
The invisible technology
Now let us confuse the issue. Archaeological evidence of microfibers – mainly bast but wool too – have been detected going back tens of thousands of years: for instance, in 30,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic deposits in Georgia, and from 28,000 to 13,500 years ago in northern China. Traces of bast have been found in the weird Natufian “boulder mortars” in Israel’s Rakefet Cave from about 13,000 years ago. Uses of these fibers remain mysterious, ditto the mortars.
The thing is that in contrast to stone tools and even bones, textiles decay really fast under most circumstances. It’s extraordinary for any of this “invisible technology” to survive the eons, Rosenberg says. One of the earliest examples of real-McCoy fabric was found in the so-called warrior’s grave by Jericho, from the late Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age. He was buried with a bow and a big piece of fabric.
As for the thought that the cotton could have reached Tel Tsaf by trade thousands of years before the horse was domesticated – it isn’t a stretch. An obsidian blade originating in Turkey was found in a Neolithic settlement next to Jerusalem from 9,000 years ago and other examples of ancient stuff being where it shouldn’t abound. Asked if there’s any evidence whatsoever of trade between Tel Tsaf specifically with prehistoric Pakistan, Rosenberg has an intriguing answer: maybe.
Obsidian beads from Anatolia.
“The only thing is beads made of olivine crystals, which we think were from Africa from around 7,000 years ago. Chemical testing shows they’re like olivine in Africa – but olivine also exists in Pakistan,” he says. “Maybe we were wrong and the olivine was from Pakistan.” Tel Tsaf also has obsidian beads hailing from Turkey and there’s also that ancient copper artifact: its origins aren’t clear, but they think it’s probably Anatolian.
“Trade” doesn’t have to mean that merchants were walking from Tel Tsaf to Anatolia or Baluchistan; artifacts may change hands over centuries before being lost or otherwise winding up in ruins that we thrill at finding thousands of years later.
In the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic, there were massive movements of peoples, and there may have been good reason why Tel Tsaf was so prosperous in that early time – hundreds of years before metals and other accoutrements of advancing civilizations would seriously arrive. It was smack on the route of long-distance exchange networks in the southern Levant. Including, maybe, with the Indus Valley.
