Located within the fertile plain of the Jezreel valley in northern Israel, the archaeological site known as Ein el-Jarba has been yielding finds that are beginning to tell a story of a people who lived there more than 6,000 years ago, before the pyramids arose in Egypt and before the ancient Canaanites dominated the region.
Archaeologist Katharina Streit (PhD student, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) has been leading a team of archaeologists, students and volunteers through full-scale excavations at the site to uncover evidence of an Early Chalcolithic (or Copper Age) human settlement.
"Little is known about this long period, which stretches over most of the 6th millennium BCE," says Streit. "This period suffers an institutional bias, not fully belonging neither in prehistory, nor Biblical archaeology."
In a way, one can hardly fault the scholarly establishment for the 'oversight'. In a region so rich in biblical history, prehistory, place-names and historical headline-grabbing archaeological discoveries, the attention has often been diverted to those things that have captured the public imagination, funding, and the draw of the popular press.
Among her goals with the project, Streit hopes to change that bias. "It is envisaged that renewed excavations at Ein el-Jarba will provide a better understanding of Kaplan’s exceptional, yet preliminary excavation results, as well as contribute to our understanding of chronology and material culture of the Protohistory of Israel," Streit adds. It was under J. Kaplan that a one-season excavation at the site was initially conducted in 1966, yielding four phases of Chalcolithic occupation with architectural remains and burials. And although the site was visited and researched to a limited extent since then, comparatively little had been done since the Kaplan excavation.
As a part of her dissertation research, Streit returned twice to the site in the Spring and Summer of 2013 with a small team to begin the first renewed excavations. The results of these initial efforts solidly met her hopes and expectations. Systematic digging turned up an intact Early Bronze Age floor, house architecture remains, a possible silo and complete ceramic vessels and, most important to their research designs, an Early Chalcolithic level "yielding a rich assemblage of finds and several floor levels".
Among the many finds were retouched flint tools, sling stones, incised pottery, and numerous blades and fragments of obsidian. She takes special note of the obsidian artifacts, mainly because of the original source of the material.
"There are no obsidian sources in Israel or in the surrounding areas. The closest potential sources are in Anatolia, so each piece of obsidian we find must have been imported from at least that distance," says Streit. This could say something about the culture and capabilities of the people who lived here.
Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more, see: popular-archaeology.com.
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