A ‘unique’ collection of ‘pearl caves’ containing archaeological artifacts has been found in an ancient tunnel.
The pearls are a type of ‘speleothem’ – mineral deposits that are formed in caves by moving water.
Unlike more commonly known speleothems, such as stalactites and stalagmites, cave pearls are generally spherical in shape and tend to be detached from the floor, walls or ceilings.
Usually less than 30cm wide, they are found in shallow pools of water in limestone caves and form when layers of calcite build up around a nucleus, often a fragment of rock or piece of mud.
A study recently published in Archaeometry, reports that 50 cave pearls have been found in an ancient tunnel in the Jerusalem Hills of Israel.
What makes this find particularly exciting is 14 of the pearls contain nuclei of pottery – of which two appear to come from ceramic lamps – and two of the pearls have nuclei of plaster.
It’s the first time ever that researchers have documented finding archaeological artifacts inside cave pearls, according to the study.
‘Until the current study, cave pearls were neither found in an archaeological context nor used for archaeological research,’ the study’s authors wrote.
The team found the cave pearls while investigating the Jwoeizeh spring tunnel in the Jerusalem hills, reports Newsweek.
A spring tunnel is an ancient man-made construction, built to extract water from perched aquifers (a type of underground water-bearing rock layer).
The southern Levant is one of the longest and oldest spring tunnels in the Southern Levant area, and is thought to date to the from the early 7th to the 8th centuries BC.
It may have formed part of a royal mansion.
The research team had not been searching for cave pearls – but came across an opening to a sealed segment of the tunnel while doing a survey in 2017.
It was within this segment, which is around 23ft long and full of soil and debris, that they found the pearls, and alongside them, an intact oil lamp, thought to date from the 3rd-4th centuries AD.
Most of the pottery nuclei have since been dated to around the Hellenistic period (333-63BC) or the later Roman to Byzantine periods, which ran from 63BC until until the 7th century AD.
The plaster nuclei, meanwhile, were dated to around the Hellenistic period.
One of the pottery samples, however, is thought to be even older, possibly dating back to the Persian(535-333 B.C.) or Babylonian (586-535 B.C.) periods—or maybe even the Iron Age.
The findings suggest that the tunnels underwent reconstruction during the Hellenistic period, with oil lamps used to light the way.
But they also provide evidence of the tunnels’ origins.
The study’s lead author Azriel Yechezkel, from the Institute of Archaeology, at Tel Aviv University, told Newsweek: ‘Our research supports our understanding that the tunnel was first constructed in the Iron Age [around the 8-7th centuries B.C.]
‘Furthermore, it provides the first analytic dating of artifacts found in the pearls… that proves the tunnel went [through] a reconstruction phase during the Hellenistic period.’
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