 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Weaving a history of two infamous places of the Bible Pots and scraps of fabric help archaelogists Monday, May 10, 1999 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were so wicked, the Bible says, that God rained fire and brimstone to destroy the ancient Palestinian "cities of the plain."
Evil and corrupt as they may have been, the residents also may have been industrious textile makers.
Archaeologists sifting through two desolate sites in southern Jordan that may be the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah have found the earliest evidence of mass production of textiles in the Near East.
Burial houses at the two sites, called Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira, have yielded thousands of loom-woven textiles, most in bits no bigger than a postage stamp. Most are linen cloths made from flax fibers.
The artifacts date to the early Bronze Age, beginning about 3150 B.C. But James Adovasio and his colleagues at the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie say the quality and style of the earliest linens are markedly different from others dating from 3000 to 2300 B.C. These later textiles reflect greater standardization, Adovasio said, suggesting that textiles were being mass produced during this period.
And mass production, Adovasio said, suggests that people were developing a complex political and social system, with centralized political control and emerging social and economic classes. This likely was a phenomenon seen in city-states throughout the region, from Egypt to the south to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the north.
Pittsburgh archaeologist R. Thomas Schaub, who has directed the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain for the past quarter century, makes no claims that Bab edh-Dhra is Sodom or that the smaller Numeira might be Gomorrah. Located at the southeast end of the Dead Sea, the sites are in the vicinity of where Biblical tradition says the cities were situated. But there is no direct evidence linking either site to the infamous cities, he emphasized.
Others have suggested that the ruined cities lie under the Dead Sea near the Lisan Peninsula.
But Schaub, an emeritus professor of philosophy and religious science at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, understands how people could look at the setting of Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira and see connections to the Biblical cities. This bleak area of the Southeast Dead Sea plain is covered by a white, soft limestone soil that supports little plant life, but reflects the harsh sun. Less than three inches of rain fall annually and afternoon temperatures often reach 125 degrees this time of year.
As Schaub has noted, both ancient and modern writers have described this region "as a veritable hell, condemned by nature and even by God."
Explorers in the 19th century visited Bab edh-Dhra but William Foxwell Albright of Johns Hopkins University put it on the archaeological map in 1924. Then serving as director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, he identified Bab edh-Dhra as a Bronze Age site. He and Melvin Kyle of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary speculated that the site, with its 22-foot thick walls, was a sanctuary for Sodom and the other four cities of the plain.
Artifacts from that expedition were used to establish the Bible Lands Museum at the seminary, beginning a long-standing link between Pittsburgh archaeologists and the Palestinian sites.
In the 1960s, pottery stolen from the sites by grave robbers began appearing in Jerusalem, stirring new interest in studying the sites and protecting them from further vandalism. Paul Lapp, who was director of the American School and who later joined the Pittsburgh seminary, led the scientific excavation of Bab edh-Dhra in 1965.
After Lapp's death in 1970, Schaub, who had focused his doctoral studies on Bab edh-Dhra, and Walter Rast of Valparaiso University in Indiana took responsibility for completing the study. A survey of the area in 1973 identified Numeira and three other sites, which led two years later to the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society and others, that project spanned six excavation seasons through 1989-90. Schaub is overseeing production of the project's final reports, a full-time endeavor since his January retirement from IUP.
About 6,000 whole pots -- not just the shards found in so many excavations -- were removed from the sites, along with various seeds, tools and metals. Many of those artifacts have since been sent to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and some to what is now called the Kelso Bible Lands Museum at the seminary.
Adovasio was not involved in the excavations, but he and his late wife, Rhonda Andrews, both specialists in ancient textiles, began studying the thousands of fiber specimens from Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira in 1976 while at the University of Pittsburgh, work that Adovasio has continued with David Hyland and Nancy Luffman-Yedlowski at Mercyhurst.
Archaeologists have traditionally focused most of their attention on nonperishable artifacts, such as stone and metal implements. These materials are durable and withstand the passage of time. This is reflected in the names given ancient time periods; the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age all describe the predominant material used in tools and weapons of those times.
But as excavation and preservation techniques have improved, scientists have been able to recover increasing amounts of perishable goods and provide a more balanced picture of ancient life. Fiber artifacts from Stone Age Europe, for instance, show that paleolithic people didn't just hunt large game with spears, but had the ability to capture small game with nets, an activity that likely involved women and older children and not just men.
Most of the textiles from the Jordanian sites were linens found in burial houses. Bodies would be placed in these charnel houses and, once they decayed to bones, pushed back to make room for additional corpses, Schaub said. A single house thus might be used for hundreds of burials spanning hundreds of years. In addition to linens, these burial houses and smaller burial shafts have yielded pottery, baskets and matting.
Made of mud brick with wood beams, "it looks like these houses were destroyed deliberately," and their walls pushed in, Schaub said.
Whatever the reason -- whether a religious rite or the work of marauders -- the destruction of the burial houses at Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira led to the preservation of the linens in which people were buried. Normally, such materials would deteriorate over time, but the combination of heat from the decaying bodies and being sealed underneath the rubble and debris caused the textiles to carbonize, Adovasio said.
"It wasn't the searing finger of God that did this," he said. The carbonization that occurred reflects an even heating, not a fire that would have turned the materials to ash. Carbonized fabric, he noted, can survive for long periods.
The vast majority of the textiles were balanced plain-weave linens. Adovasio said the small size of the specimens makes it impossible to say whether these were fabrics used for burial wrappings or were simply clothes in which the dead were buried.
The latest recovery techniques might have allowed excavators to remove sizable pieces with the tell-tale edging intact, Adovasio said, but he and his colleagues had to make do with the postage-stamp specimens.
One thing was apparent: samples dated since 3000 B.C. were noticeably more standardized, with less variation in the warps and wefts of the fabrics, than earlier fabrics. All of the linens, both before and after 3000 B.C., were woven on looms. But the homemade quality of the earliest fabrics gives way to what appears to be organized, highly efficient production -- mass production.
The linens were made with yarn spun from flax. Schaub said analyses of seeds found at the sites show that flax was domesticated and cultivated at these sites. Flax would have been valuable for both its fibers and for flaxseed oil.
At Numeira, workers found an open work area that might have been the site of one of these early factories. Schaub said a large number of bone weaving instruments and looms were found there.
The shift from individuals making their fabrics, basketry and other woven items for their own use to groups of workers producing large quantities for sale or barter suggests that city-states of the Bronze Age had advanced beyond chiefdoms. Some sort of central authority would be necessary to organize production, enforce a market economy, and deal with people who resist this "proto-capitalism," Adovasio said.
Some houses are bigger than others, suggesting that some people did better economically than others and perhaps signifying the emergence of a ruling class.
Bab edh-Dhra had a population of perhaps 1,500 to 2,000, Schaub said; more people probably lived outside its walls.
These sorts of walled city-states were found throughout the sparsely populated but thriving region. The sites contain trade objects such as metal swords and daggers from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
While the climate was once a bit more humid than it is now, the amount of precipitation had dropped off to modern levels by the middle of the third millenium B.C., Schaub said. But then, as now, water would run off from the neighboring highlands, about 3,300 feet above sea level, down into the valley, 1,200 feet below sea level, in flash floods along ravines called wadis. People of the plain could capture this water and use it to irrigate their fields.
Just what happened that led to the destruction of these cities is not known, Schaub said. Three bodies found trapped under a collapsed tower in Numeira fueled speculation that earthquakes might have ravaged the area. Whatever the cause, both Numeira and Bab edh-Dhra were destroyed and abandoned about the same time. Little human activity is apparent in the area between 2,000 B.C. and at least 1,000 B.C.
Given the Biblical stories of divine destruction, "that adds to the legend of the area," he admitted.
|
||||||||||||
