9,000-yr-old Site near Jerusalem is the “Big Bang” of Prehistory Settlement

A huge 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement — the largest ever discovered in Israel, say archaeologists — is currently being excavated outside Jerusalem, researchers said in mid  2019.

This site, located near the town of Motza, is the “Big Bang” for prehistory settlement research due to its size and the preservation of its material culture, said Jacob Vardi, co-director of the excavations at Motza on behalf of the Antiquities Authority, according to The Times of Israel.

Among the many important findings is that 9,000 years ago, the people of the settlement practiced religion. “They carried out rituals and honored their deceased ancestors,” Vardi, an archaeologist, told Religion News Service.

Perhaps 3,000 people lived in this settlement near where Jerusalem is today, making it quite a large city for the period that is sometimes called the New Stone Age. The site has “yielded thousands of tools and ornaments, including arrowheads, figurines and jewelry,” said CNN.”

The findings also provide evidence of sophisticated urban planning and farming, which may force experts to rethink the region’s early history, said archeologists involved in the excavation.”

Although the area has long been of archeological interest, Vardi said the sheer scale of the site — which measures between 30 and 40 hectares — only emerged in 2015 during surveys for a proposed highway.

“It’s a game changer, a site that will drastically shift what we know about the Neolithic era,” said Vardi in an interview with The Times of Israel. Already some international scholars are beginning to realize the existence of the site may necessitate revisions to their work, he said.

“So far, it was believed that the Judea area was empty, and that sites of that size existed only on the other bank of the Jordan river, or in the Northern Levant. Instead of an uninhabited area from that period, we have found a complex site, where varied economic means of subsistence existed, and all this only several dozens of centimeters below the surface,” according to Vardi and co-director Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily in an IAA press release.

This site predates the first known settlement in Jerusalem by about 3,500 years. Experts had not thought that people lived in such a concentrated fashion during this time in the region.

During the 16-month excavation, archaeologists discovered large buildings, separated by well-planned alleys, used for residential and public purposes. Some of the buildings contained plaster remnants.

Pieces of jewelry, including bracelets made of stone and mother of pearl, as well as figurines, locally made flint axes, sickle blades, knives, and thousands of arrowheads were also unearthed, said Religion News.

Vardi said the residents buried their dead with care in designated burial locations and placed “either useful or precious objects, believed to serve the deceased” after they died, inside the graves.

“We have decorated burial sites, with offerings, and we also found statuettes and figurines, which indicate they had some sort of belief, faith, rituals,” Vardi said. “We also found certain installations, special niches that might have played a role in ritual.”

Sheds held a large number of well-preserved legume seeds, something the archaeologists called “astonishing” given how much time has passed.

“This finding is evidence of an intensive practice of agriculture. Moreover, one can conclude from it that the Neolithic Revolution reached its summit at that point: animal bones found on the site show that the settlement’s residents became increasingly specialized in sheep-keeping, while the use of hunting for survival gradually decreased,” the antiquities authority said.

Archaeologists Discover and Crack an Intact, 1,000-Year-Old Chicken Egg

Israel Antiquities Authority has discovered a fully intact 1,000-year-old chicken egg during recent excavations in a town named Yavne.

The archaeologists said the thousand-year-old egg was perfectly preserved by being initially pillowed in soft human poop inside the cesspit.

According to IAA, “the egg had a small crack in the bottom so most of the contents had leaked out of it. Only some of the yolk remained, which was preserved for future DNA analysis”.

The archeologists said that despite the extreme caution with which the egg was removed, the shell of the egg was cracked by picking it up. However, in the IAA’s organics laboratory, a conservationist restored the egg to the state in which it was found.

“Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the eggs’ fragile shells, hardly any whole chicken eggs have been preserved. Even at the global level, this is an extremely rare find,” says Dr. Lee Perry Gal,” said Dr Lee Perry Gal of the IAA.

Gal said, “In archaeological digs, we occasionally find ancient ostrich eggs, whose thicker shells preserve them intact”.

“The egg’s unique preservation is evidently due to the conditions in which it lay for centuries, nestled in a cesspit containing soft human waste that preserved it,” IAA said.

According to Gal, ancient chickens found in the region, as well as their eggs, were smaller than modern ones. “Chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia relatively recently, around 6,000 years ago, but it took time for them to enter the human diet,” Gal noted.

Alongside the egg, three typical Islamic-period bone dolls used as playthings were also discovered, Gal added.

Stone Age village dating back 12,000 Years uncovered beside the Sea of Galilee

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a prehistoric village in the Jordan Valley dating from around 12,000 years ago, The Hebrew University revealed on february 2016.

The site, named NEG II, is located in Wadi Ein-Gev, west of the Sea of Galilee and south of the Golan Heights town of Katzrin, and is estimated to cover an area of roughly 1,200 square meters (three acres).

In a series of excavations, archaeologists found numerous artifacts pointing to a vast human settlement including burial remains, flint tools, art manifestations, faunal assemblage and stone and bone tools.

While other sites from the same period have been unearthed in the area, the Institute of Archaeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that NEG II was unique in that it contains cultural characteristics typical of both the Old Stone Age – known as the Paleolithic period – and the New Stone Age, known as the Neolithic period.

“Although attributes of the stone tool kit found at NEG II place the site chronologically in the Paleolithic period, other characteristics – such as its artistic tradition, size, thickness of archaeological deposits and investment in architecture – are more typical of early agricultural communities in the Neolithic period,” said chief excavator Dr. Leore Grosman.

“Characterizing this important period of potential overlap in the Jordan Valley is crucial for the understanding of the socioeconomic processes that marked the shift from Paleolithic mobile societies of hunter-gatherers to Neolithic agricultural communities,” she added.

The Paleolithic period is considered the earliest period in the history of mankind. The end of that era is marked by the transition to agricultural societies with the emergence of settled villages and domestication of plants and animals.

According to Grosman, NEG II was likely occupied in the midst of the cold and dry global climatic event known as the Younger Dryas, when temperatures declined sharply over most of the northern hemisphere around 12,900–11,600 years ago.

Affected by climatic changes, groups in the area became increasingly mobile and potentially smaller in size, she said.

NEG II, however, shows that some groups in the Jordan Valley may have become larger in size and preferred town-like settlements to a nomadic existence.

Researchers said this shift in settlement pattern could be related to climate conditions that provided the ingredients necessary for prehistoric man to take the final steps toward agriculture in the southern Levant.

“It is not surprising that at a number of sites in the Jordan Valley we find a cultural entity that bridges the crossroads between Late Paleolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers,” Grosman said.

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.

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.”

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.

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

Archaeologists in Israel Unearth 3,800-Year-Old Skeleton of Baby Buried in a Jar

Researchers are unsure of the unusual funerary practice’s purpose, but one theory posits that the vessel serves as a symbolic womb

Archaeologists excavating a site in Jaffa, Israel, recently made a macabre discovery: a 3,800-year-old jar containing the skeleton of a baby.

As Ariel David reports for Haaretz, researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) uncovered the poorly preserved remains, which were buried in a shallow pit about ten feet below street level, while surveying the ruins of the 4,000-year-old city ahead of construction.

The practice of burying babies in jars dates back to the Bronze Age and continued until as recently as the 20th century, IAA archaeologist Yoav Arbel tells Live Science’s Laura Geggel. But while evidence of such funerary rituals regularly appears in the archaeological record, scholars remain unsure of the practice’s purpose.

“You might go to the practical thing and say that the bodies were so fragile, [maybe] they felt the need to protect it from the environment, even though it is dead,” says Arbel. “But there’s always the interpretation that the jar is almost like a womb, so basically the idea is to return [the] baby back into Mother Earth, or into the symbolic protection of his mother.”

Speaking with Ashley Cowie of Ancient Origins, archaeologist Alfredo Mederos Martin, who was not involved in the IAA research, notes that people across the ancient world entombed children in jars as early as 4,500 B.C. Methods varied from place to place, with civilizations adapting the process to reflect their unique conceptions of death.

In a 2019 article published in the Biblical Archaeology Review, scholar Beth Alpert Nakhai suggested that the jars’ burial beneath the home signified “a desire on the part of [the] dead infant’s mother to care for her child in death, as she would have cared for that child in life.”

These kinds of burials could also reflect a change in ancient societies’ attitude toward the young; previously, prehistoric humans had only buried adults in jars, “indicating that children were [thought] to be of little importance,” as Ruth Schuster pointed out for Haaretz in 2022.

Over the past decade, officials have conducted digs at five locations across Jaffa. They detailed their impressive array of discoveries in the IAA’s journal, ‘Atiqot, last month.

Highlights of the finds include 30 Hellenistic coins; the remains of at least two horses and pottery dated to the late Ottoman Empire; 95 glass vessel fragments from the Roman and Crusader periods; 14 fifth-century B.C. rock-carved burials featuring lamps, juglets and other funerary offerings; and the strangely interred infant.

Jaffa has a storied history that spans some four millennia. One of the world’s earliest port cities, the ancient settlement is now part of Tel Aviv, Israel’s second-most populated metropolis.

According to Haaretz, Jaffa experienced at least three periods of major expansion. The first took place in Hellenistic times, while the second stretched across the Byzantine, Islamic and Crusader eras.

Finally, Arbel tells Haaretz, “[f]rom the mid-19th century to the end of the Ottoman era there was huge population growth. Jaffa grew exponentially and became a cosmopolitan city.”

The researcher adds that experts hadn’t realized the full extent of the city’s archaeological wealth until recently.

“There were those who told us there was no point to excavate around the mound,” or central stretch of high ground on which Jaffa is situated, he says.

But subsequent archaeological work revealed that Jaffa, like many other ancient cities, expanded into the surrounding lowlands during periods of prosperity and tightened up its boundaries in times of strife.

Though researchers covered up many of the archaeological sites after recording their overlooked histories, several—from Crusader-era walls preserved in a hospital-turned-hotel to the ruins of an Ottoman-era soap factory—remain accessible to the public.

Hoard of 2,150-year-old silver coins found in Modiin, Israel

Archeologists in Modiin reached a rare silver cache in an ancient wall gap. During a rescue excavation in central Israel, the garden of silver coins dated from the Hasmonean period(126 BCE) was shown.

“Perhaps the cache belonged to a Jew who hides his money in the expectation of coming back to recover it, but he was disappointed and never came back,” says the Modiin excavation managing director Abraham Tendler.

Shekelles and half-shekels (tetradrachm and didrachm) minted at Tyre City, bearing images of the king, Antiochus VII and his brother Demetrius II are the rare silver caches of the late Hasmonean period.

The treasure was placed in a rock crevice, opposite a wall of an impressive farmyard which was uncovered during the excavation.

“The cache, which consists of 16 coins, contains one or two coins from every year between 135–126 BCE, and a total of nine consecutive years are represented. It seems that some thought went into collecting the coins, and it is possible that the person who buried the cache was a coin collector.

He acted in just the same way as stamp and coin collectors manage collections today”.  Dr. Donald Tzvi Ariel, the head of the Coin Depart-ment at the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a press statement from the IIA.

Or maybe: “The cache that we found is compelling evidence that one of the members of the estate who had saved his income for months needed to leave the house for some unknown reason.

He buried his money in the hope of coming back and collecting it, but was apparently unfortunate and never returned. It is exciting to think that the coin hoard was waiting here 2,140 years until we exposed it” Tendler said.

He added, “The findings from our excavation show that a Jewish fami-ly established an agricultural estate on this hill during the Hasmonean period. The family members planted olive trees and vineyards on the neighboring hills and grew grain in valleys.

An industrial area that includes an olive press and storehouses where the olive oil was kept is currently being uncovered next to the estate. Dozens of rock-hewn winepresses that reflect the importance of viti-culture and the wine industry in the area were exposed in the culti-vation plots next to the estate.

The estate house was built of massive walls in order to provide security from the attacks of marauding bandits.”

Numerous bronze coins minted by the Hasmonean kings were also discovered in the excavation.

They bear the names of the kings such as Yehohanan, Judah, Jonathan or Mattathias and his title: High Priest and Head of the Council of the Jews.

The finds indicate that the estate continued to operate throughout the Early Roman period.The Jewish inhabitants of the estate meticulously adhered to the laws of ritual purity and impurity: they installed ritual baths ( miqwe’ot) in their settlement and used vessels made of chalk, which according to Jewish law cannot become ritually unclean.

Evidence was discovered at the site suggesting that the residents of the estate also participated in the first revolt against the Romans that broke out in 66 CE: the coins that were exposed from this period are stamped with the date ‘Year Two’ of the revolt and the slogan ‘Free-dom of Zion’.

The estate continued to operate even after the destruction of the Tem-ple in 70 CE. “It seems that local residents did not give up hope of gaining their independence from Rome, and they were well-prepared to fight the enemy during the Bar Kokhba uprising”, said Tendler and continued.

The unique finds revealed in the excavation will be preserved in an archaeological park in the heart of the new neighborhood slated for construction in Modi‘in-Maccabim-Re‘ut.

12,000-year-old funeral feast uncovered in Israeli cave

The woman’s corpse was set on a bed of gazelle horn cores, fragments of chalk, fresh clay, limestone blocks and sediment.

Eighty-six tortoise shells were placed under and around her body, while seashells, an eagle’s wing, a leopard’s pelvis, a forearm of a wild boar and a human foot were placed atop the 1.5-meter-tall woman. A large stone was added to seal the site.

The Hebrew University archaeologist who discovered the grave in a cave on the bank of the Hilazon River in the Western Galilee in 2022 knew that it was not an ordinary funeral because three other grave pits found in the vicinity since 1995 did not have any of the unusual objects that this one did.

It took eight years for Prof. Leore Grosman from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Prof. Natalie Munro from the University of Connecticut to identify the six stages of the mysterious funeral ritual. Their research was published in the journal Current Anthropology.

They believe the deceased may have been a shaman during the Natufian period, 15,000 to 11,500 years ago.

According to their reconstruction, the funeral began with the excavation of an oval pit in the cave floor. A layer of objects was cached between large stones, including seashells, a broken basalt palette, red ochre, chalk and several tortoise shells. These were covered by a layer of sediment containing ashes, flint and animal bones.

About halfway through the ritual, the woman was laid inside the pit in a child-bearing position, and special items including many more tortoise shells were placed on top of and around her.

This was followed by another layer of filling and limestones of various sizes placed directly on the body. The ritual concluded with the sealing of the grave.

The archeologists speculate that the collection of materials and the capture and preparation of animals for the feast, particularly the 86 tortoises, must have been time-consuming.

“The significant pre-planning implies that there was a defined ‘to do’ list, and a working plan of ritual actions and their order,” said Grosman.

Cache of gold coins and 900-year-old gold earring found in Caesarea

During an extensive excavation and conservation work in Caesarea conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority and sponsored by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundation IL, a hidden treasure of Caesarea was found.

The treasure contains a combination of coins not yet seen in Israel – 18 Fatimid dinars, well known from previous excavations in Caesarea where it was the standard local currency of the time and a small and extremely rare group of six Byzantine imperial gold coins.

Five of the coins are concave and belong to the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071–1079) – Dr. Robert Kool, coin expert at the Israel Antiquities Authority explains.

According to the directors of the excavation, Dr. Peter Gendelman and Mohammed Hatar of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “The coins in the cache make it possible to link the treasure to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101, one of the most dramatic events in the medieval history of the city.

According to contemporary written sources, most of the inhabitants of Caesarea were massacred by the army of Baldwin I (1100–1118), king of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

It is reasonable to assume that the treasure’s owner and his family perished in the massacre or were sold into slavery, and therefore were not able to retrieve their gold.”

At the center of the excavation and conservation activity of the multi-year Caesarea project, stands the impressive façade of the city’s ancient central public building.

It was part of a sacred compound first built by Herod more than two millennia ago, as a tribute to his Roman patron, the emperor Augustus, and the goddess Roma. The newly discovered treasure was found in this area.

This important discovery was found close to the location of two other treasures of the same period. The first, a pot consisting of gold and silver jewelry, was discovered in the 1960s. The second, a collection of bronze vessels, was found in the 1990s. 

The new finding highlights the notion of Caesarea being a vibrant port city since its establishment 2,030 years ago.

Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on the Biblical Philistines

Sometime in the 12th century B.C., a family in the ancient port city of Ashkelon, in what is Israel, mourned the loss of a child. But they didn’t go to the city’s cemetery. Instead, they dug a small pit in the dirt floor of their home and buried the infant right in the place where they lived.

That child’s DNA is now helping scholars trace the origins of the Philistines, a long-standing, somewhat contentious mystery. In accounts from the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines appear mostly as villainous enemies of the Israelites. They sent Delilah to cut the hair of the Israelite leader Samson and thus stripped him of his power. Goliath, the giant slain by David, was a Philistine. The Philistines’ reputation as a hostile, war-mongering, hedonistic tribe became so pervasive that “philistine” is still sometimes lobbed as an insult for an uncultured or crass person.

But who were the Philistines, exactly? In the Bible, ancient cities like Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron were mentioned as Philistine strongholds. In the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars finally started to piece together a distinct archaeological record of Philistine culture. Excavations revealed that these cities saw the emergence of new architecture and artifacts at the beginning of the Iron Age, around 1200 B.C., signaling the arrival of the Philistines.

Pottery found at Philistine archaeological sites, for example, appeared to have been made locally, but looked strikingly like wares created by Aegean cultures such as the Mycenaeans, who built their civilization in what is now mainland Greece. And the Bible mentions “Caphtor,” or Crete, as the origin place of the Philistines.

Historians also know that, around the time these changes occur in the archaeological record, civilizations in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were collapsing.

The Philistines are written about in Egyptian hieroglyphs, where they are referred to as the Peleset, among the tribes of “Sea Peoples” said to have battled against Pharaoh Ramses III around 1180 B.C. Meanwhile, other scholars have suggested that the Philistines were in fact a local tribe, or one that came from present-day Turkey or Syria.

Now, researchers have extracted DNA from the remains of 10 individuals, including four infants, who were buried at Ashkelon during the Bronze Age and Iron Age. The results, which were published today in the journal Science Advances, suggest the Philistines indeed migrated to the Middle East from southern Europe.

“This is an excellent example of a case where advances in science have helped us answer a question that has been long debated by archaeologists and ancient historians,” says Eric Cline, a professor at George Washington University and director of the Capitol Archaeology Institute, who was not involved in the study.

The new study stems from a discovery in 2013 of a cemetery with more than 200 burials contemporary with the Philistine settlement at Ashkelon just outside the ancient city walls. The cemetery, which was used during the late Iron Age, between the 11th and 8th centuries B.C., was the first Philistine burial ground ever found.

The archaeologists documented burial practices that were distinct from the Philistines’ Canaanite predecessors and their Egyptian neighbors. For example, in several cases, little jugs of perfume were tucked near the head of the deceased. Finding Philistine human remains also meant there might be potential to find Philistine DNA.

“We knew of the revolution in paleogenetics, and the way people were able to gather from a single individual hundreds of thousands of data points,” says Daniel Master, the director of the excavations and a professor of archaeology at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Getting DNA from the newly discovered human remains at Ashkelon, however, proved tricky. The southern Levant does not have a favorable climate for the preservation of DNA, which can break down when it’s too warm or humid, says Michal Feldman, who studies archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, and is the lead author of the new report. Nonetheless, the researchers were able to sequence the whole genome of three individuals from the cemetery.

The researchers interpreted these results as evidence that migration indeed occurred at the end of the Bronze Age or during the early Iron Age. If that’s true, the infants may have been the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the first Philistines to arrive in Canaan.

Intriguingly, their DNA already had a mixture of southern European and local signatures, suggesting that within a few generations the Philistines were marrying into the local population. In fact, the European signatures were not detectable at all in the individuals buried a few centuries later in the Philistine cemetery. Genetically, by then the Philistines looked like Canaanites.

That fact in itself offers additional information about Philistine culture. “When they came, they did not have any kind of taboo or prohibition against marrying into other groups around them,” Master says. Nor, it would seem, did other groups categorically have that taboo about them, either. “One of the things that I think it shows is that the world was really complicated, whether we’re talking about genetics or identity or language or culture, and things are changing all the time,” he adds.

Cline cautions that it’s always best to be careful about connecting new genetic data to cultures and historic events, and the researchers recognize that if they had only looked at the DNA from the Philistine cemetery, they might have come up with a totally different story about the identity of the Philistines.

“Our history appears to be full of these transient pulses of genetic mixing that disappear without a trace,” says Marc Haber, a geneticist at the U.K.’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, who was not involved in the study. Haber has previously found evidence of “pulses” of gene flows from Europe to the Near East during the Middle Ages, which disappeared centuries later. “Ancient DNA has the power to look deep into the past and give us information on events that we knew little or nothing about.”

The findings are a good reminder, Feldman says, that a person’s culture or ethnicity is not the same as their DNA. “In this situation, you have foreign people coming in with a slightly different genetic makeup, and their influence, genetically, is very short. It doesn’t leave a long-lasting impact, but culturally they made an impact that lasted for many years.”