Defining multiple inhabitations of a cave environment using interdisciplinary archaeometry: the \u2018Christmas Cave\u2019 of the Wadi en-Nar/Nahal Qidron, West of the Dead Sea

Kaare Lund Rasmussen,Greg Doudna,Maria Perla Colombini,Francesca Modugno,Naama Sukenik,Thomas Delbey,Ilaria Degano,Johannes Van Der Plicht,Uri Davidovich,Amos Frumkin,Guillermo De La Fuente,Orit Shamir,Joan Taylor,Mladen Popović,Roi Porat

doi:10.1186/s40494-022-00652-2

Abstract

The present study reports a series of interdisciplinary archaeometrical analyses of objects found in the Christmas Cave, which was discovered by John Allegro and his team in 1960 on the West Bank of the Dead Sea and assumed to be inhabited only in the Chalcolithic era and by Jewish refugees of the second century CE, at the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Like many other Judaean desert caves, there was an abundance of organic material, especially textiles, surviving in the dry environment. In the absence of clear stratigraphy and even a proper publication of the finds, the present study shows how archaeometry can provide important insights. We analysed food crusts on ceramics by gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (GC–MS), made petrographic descriptions to estimated provenance of the ceramics, produced new radiocarbon dates from organic material and thermoluminescence (TL) dates from the pottery. It appears from the data that the Christmas Cave has been briefly inhabited or visited intermittently over a very long time, starting ca. 4000 BCE (the Chalcolithic period), and extending all the way to the Medieval period, even though there is also a concentration of dates near the period of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE). We argue, through a detailed analysis of the radiometric and TL-datings and by the artefactual evidence, that there was likely another refuge episode connected with the First Jewish Revolt during which people fled to this cave. However, we see no material connection to Qumran and nearby caves. Overall, our study demonstrates the importance of archaeometric studies in cave environments where stratigraphy is veritably absent.

Highlights

Cave environments are often challenging to archaeologists when it comes to the dating of artefacts found within them
The columns are the laboratory identification numbers, the 14C activities and measurement uncertainties, the Carbon content (C%) of the analysed sample materials, the δ13C values, the 14C ages in Before Present (BP) and the calibrated age ranges in CE/BCE, both 1σ and 2σ
The radiation contribution from the soil is applied as half the calculated average soil composition, because the ceramic samples were assumed to have been residing on the floor of the cave, not dug down into the chalkstone

Summary

Introduction

Cave environments are often challenging to archaeologists when it comes to the dating of artefacts found within them. We deploy a range of interdisciplinary studies in key fields of archaeometry. We consider another cave in the Judaean wilderness, the socalled ‘Christmas Cave’, in order to probe whether use of these scientific methods can further nuance conclusions about human inhabitation of a cave environment, and the identity of the people who came here. While the team’s original hope was that this cave could yield more Dead Sea Scrolls, only tiny pieces of one papyrus written in Greek were found, and they never fully published either this or the other artefacts they excavated [2, 3]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion