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We who study human evolution in South Africa are fortunate to work in a time of great excitement. It’s not every day that our research finds its way into the headlines. But, discoveries of early human skeletons were recently splashed across the pages of the New York Times. They spoke of the “Cradle of Humankind,” a 466 square km UNESCO World Heritage site comprising dozens of caves in populous Gauteng Province, which is home to the metropolises of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Not long ago the Sterkfontein and Malapa caves gave up, respectively, “Little Foot,” about 3.5 million years old, and “Karabo,” about 2 million years old. And now, we have Homo naledi, found in the Rising Star cave system.

We join our paleoanthropological colleagues and the interested public in applauding these thrilling and edifying discoveries. But we also welcome the opportunity this publicity affords to dust off another jewel in South Africa’s fossil crown—the cave of Swartkrans. This is a site every bit as unassuming, and just as fundamentally significant to studies of human evolution, as is its long-time director of research, C. K. (Bob) Brain.

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 Above: Top section, Swartkrans Cave’s position (star) in the “Cradle of Humankind,” with some other important human evolution sites indicated by black dots (top right). Bottom section, view of Swartkrans looking north, across the Bloubank River (bottom); SK II is a fossil-rich side-extension of the site’s main cave, in which we have initiated exploratory research.

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The pioneers

Brain’s path to Swartkrans was paved by Robert Broom, one of the most important paleoanthropologists of the twentieth century. After many years prospecting for fossils of the reptilian ancestors of mammals in the tough backcountries of Australia and South Africa, Broom became intrigued by the 1925 publication of the skull of an early human toddler, the “Taung Child” (nicknamed for the cave where it was found). Raymond Dart (pictured right*), who described the skull, argued that it represented a previously unknown ancestral species of human, that lived millions of years ago, soon after the chimpanzee and human lineages split apart from a common ancestor. Dart called the new human species Australopithecus africanus.

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The Taung Child, Australopithecus africanus skull. Credit Jason L. Heaton

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In the ensuing decades, several other species of Australopithecus (or, in the vernacular, “ape-men”) have been identified across Africa, from geological contexts ranging between 4.2 and less than a million years ago. But throughout the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, Australopithecus, with its small braincase and ape-like face, found little acceptance in the halls of European and American academies. Most experts consigned the Taung Child to the non-human ape category, and granted it no special significance for elucidating human evolution. Everyone “knew” Africa was a dead end for paleoanthropological research; Europe was the birthplace of humanity. That had been the thinking since 1912, when the “Piltdown Man” skull was unearthed in England. Piltdown Man was “obviously” a transitional, ape-like species, with a primitive lower jaw and teeth, but a large, advanced human-like braincase. Such was the view of the most respected early twentieth century scientific experts. Piltdown Man was, of course, eventually proven to be a hoax—the cranium of a modern human and the lower jawbone of an orangutan, clumsily altered to look timeworn, and then planted together in the Piltdown gravel pit. But its initial universal acceptance as a human ancestor forestalled appreciation of the evidence of human evolution in South Africa for nearly forty years.

Robert Broom’s belief in the Taung Child was an important exception to the prevailing attitude. In fact, after meeting Dart and seeing the Taung Child firsthand, Broom’s stated mission became finding more examples of this fossil’s kind, which he was convinced would persuade the rest the world that Australopithecus was a bona fide human ancestor. Broom (pictured left**) had success on both fronts, recovering Australopithecus fossils at Sterkfontein Cave in the 1930s and then, in 1948, shifting his attention to Swartkrans Cave, less than a kilometer north of Sterkfontein, across the underwhelming Bloubank River.

With assistance from paleontologist John Robinson, Broom’s work at Swartkrans soon yielded abundant Australopithecus fossils.  However, the skulls of the Swartkrans fossil humans are more heavily built, and their teeth more thickly enameled than those of Australopithecus africanus. Broom had found similar, robustly built ape-man fossils in 1938 at nearby Kromdraai Cave. Broom and Robinson were convinced that the differences between Australopithecus africanus and the Swartkrans/Kromdraai fossils were so significant that the two types warranted separate status, and argued that the latter fossils represented a more specialized form of ape-man, belonging to a genus they named Paranthropus.

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SK 48, a Paranthropus robustus cranium from Swartkrans. Credit Jason L. Heaton

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Present-day specialists disagree as to whether or not Paranthropus is so different from Australopithecus as to merit its own separate classification. We won’t concern ourselves with that issue here, but we do stress that more recent work at Swartkrans has gone a long way toward clarifying the ecology and behavioral adaptations of the “robust” ape-men, as compared to the older and more fine-boned Australopithecus africanus from Taung and Sterkfontein caves.

It must be said that the original efforts toward a better understanding of ecology and behavior were largely John Robinson’s, who, by the 1950s had formulated what became known as the “dietary hypothesis” to explain the perceived differences between Paranthropus and Australopithecus. At that time, many believed (erroneously) that Australopithecus africanus was the direct ancestor of our genus, Homo, and (also erroneously) that Australopithecus africanus was contemporary with Paranthropus from Swartkrans.

Robinson, and others, understood that the habitats of all the ape-man species were less forested than those of the creatures of previous times from which they evolved. Just as in Africa today, plant foods preferred by hominins—things like soft, ripe fruits and tender, young leaves—were much less abundant in savannas than in forests. Robinson conjectured that savanna-dwelling Paranthropus maintained a strictly herbivorous diet, but diverged from its forest ancestors in specializing on the coarse vegetable matter common in open country. Such resources, like nuts and plant roots, are either extremely hard or fibrous—tough to chew—and it was in this light that the large jaws and thickly enameled teeth of Paranthropus made evolutionary sense.

In contrast, the jaws and teeth of Homo, and its presumptive ancestor, Australopithecus africanus, are more gracile. Robinson contended that this more lightly constructed ape-man (and, later, Homo) “solved” the problem of savanna survival by incorporating meat into its diet. Meat on the hoof—in the form of large herds of grazing ungulates—is more readily available on the African savanna than it is in its forests. Meat is also relatively soft and does not require that its consumer have a massive dental apparatus in order to break it down in the mouth. Meat does, however, adhere to bones, comes in large packages, and is stubbornly encased in hairy, elastic hides, so a cutting technology would have been most useful for a clawless and blunt-toothed human ancestor that had begun to exploit this resource. Thus, the invention of stone tools—at ~2.5-million-years-ago, roughly coincident with the emergence of the robust ape-men and the genus Homo—became completely explicable and assignable to proto-Homo with the resource partitioning between gracile- and robust-jawed human forms envisaged in Robinson’s dietary hypothesis. Further, acquiring meat presumably requires a smarter brain than does picking stationary nuts or grubbing for fixed roots. Under this construct, it was therefore not surprising that our large-brained, small-faced lineage persists today as us, and that the small-brained, large-faced robust ape-man Paranthropus eventually went extinct.

A new protagonist for a new age

This narrative was firmly ensconced in paleoanthropology by the mid-1960s, when a new generation of research was begun at Swartkrans by Bob Brain. Like Broom, Brain’s career in paleoanthropology was heavily influenced by Raymond Dart. But, unlike Broom, Brain was more concerned with Dart’s ideas about the behavior of early humans, than with his interpretations of their anatomy and classification. Dart argued that ape-men were “confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.” According to Dart, ape-men were able to enact all this mayhem by wielding the defleshed bones of their prey as weapons against their next victims. Given Dart’s considerable influence among his peers, human ancestors were now conceived of as “killer apes,” no less bloodthirsty than a fictional band of post-apocalyptic, flesh-eating zombies.

Brain was, in response to Dart’s killer ape scenario, agog. The hypothesis cried out to be tested, and Swartkrans Cave became Brain’s primary proving ground. Importantly, Brain brought to this fossil laboratory his knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships in the modern world as they related to the accumulation of bones in caves. Brain’s research on bone-accumulating processes in caves revealed that the patterns of animal body part representation and bone damage documented by Dart at ape-man sites were comfortably attributable to forces other than the supposed predatory and murderous behavior of cave-dwelling ape-men. Portions of antelope bones represented at Swartkrans were not there because they were selected by ape-men to use as tools and weapons. Rather, they were simply those skeletal parts that were too dense or too poor in nutrients for carnivores to destroy when consuming the carcasses that they had dragged into the cave.

With modern caves in mind, ancient Swartkrans could no longer be reconstructed as the dank domicile of ape-men. Instead, Brain revealed the cave to be the receptacle of feeding debris that was generated over long periods by large cats and hyenas. And, based on the great number of their fossils, including many scarred by carnivore tooth marks, ape-men were apparently one of the favorite prey animals of those predators. Dents and missing sections of Paranthropus skulls were not created by bone clubs, as Dart had contended, but instead by accumulated pressure, as bones were being buried and compressed under the increasing weight of sediment that washed into the cave year after year. The reason that skulls of ape-men are so abundant at Swartkrans is that heads offered little in the way of nutritional value to carnivores; the rest of the ape-man body, a comparative wealth of meat and marrow, was consumed in its near-entirety. In the process, bones were crushed into unidentifiable splinters. As Brain continued to develop these thoroughly convincing, but comparatively mundane, rejoinders to Dart’s fantastic scenarios of how ape-man sites formed, the killer ape hypothesis was dismantled.

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Long-time director of research at Swartkrans, C.K. (Bob) Brain (top). SK 54, a Paranthropus robustus cranium from Swartkrans (bottom right) with two puncture marks, created by the lower canine teeth of its presumed predator, a leopard—the lower jaw of which is illustrated on the bottom left. Credit Jason L. Heaton

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Brain’s real-world results pulled back the veil to reveal ape-men not as cannibalistic hunters, but as hapless prey. His conclusions also accorded well with Robinson’s view that Paranthropus was a herbivore, eking out an existence in the long shadows thrown by a raft of menacing carnivores. Moreover, Brain’s new archaeological investigations at Swartkrans only solidified the notion that its fossil denizens were much meeker “noble savages” than envisaged by Dart. That Swartkrans yielded stone cutting tools came as no surprise. It was way back in 1949, still under the aegis of Broom and Robinson, that the first fossil of the genus Homo was discovered at Swartkrans (originally classified as Telanthropus, but quickly subsumed into our own—the “true” human—genus). Following Robinson’s dietary hypothesis, Homo was naturally linked to stone tools because, as an omnivore, Homo “obviously” required a cutting technology in order to render animal carcasses into edible portions.

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SK 847, the cranium of early Homo from Swartkrans (left) with simple stone cutting tools (right), probably used to butcher the carcasses of large prey animals. Credit Jason L. Heaton

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More unexpected at Swartkrans was Brain’s unearthing of a cache of pointed antelope long-bone fragments, delicately smoothed and polished at their ends—completely unlike the mass of other unintentionally broken bones also found in the cave.

But make no mistake. Brain’s bone points are not some dubious echo of Dart’s fanciful ape-man bone-tool culture, but are instead genuine implements made and used by ancient humans. When Brain showed the nearly blind, 90-year-old Dart the new tools in 1981, Dart felt the smooth, tapering points with his fingers. Then he said:

“Brain, I always told you that [ape-men] made bone tools, but you never believed me! What were these used for?” I [Brain] replied that I thought that they had been used for digging in the ground [in order to extract edible roots]. Dart slumped back in his chair with a look of total disbelief on his face. “That,” he said, “is the most unromantic explanation I have heard of in my life!” He then grabbed the longest of the bone points and stuck it into my ribs saying, “Brain, I could run you through with this!”

Never mind Dart’s good-natured protestations: paleoanthropologists quickly accepted Brain’s more pedestrian interpretation that Paranthropus, the specialized herbivore, used the bone tools to dig up plant roots to eat.

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Replicas of bone tools from Swartkrans used for digging up an edible plant root (top left) and to breech a termite mound (top right); wear on a utilized tool is shown in the middle top panel. Actual fossil bone tools from Swartkrans (bottom). Credit Jason L. Heaton

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By 1979, Brain’s other major archaeological discovery at Swartkrans—nearly 300 burned bones—had come to light. Unlike the case of the bone tools, specialists tended to credit these traces to the activities of Homo, and not to Paranthropus. This is because Brain’s analyses concluded that the bones were burned in humanly controlled fires, which are among the earliest known in the world. For many, this major technological innovation was beyond the ability (and need) of the small-brained, herbivorous ape-men. In contrast, larger-brained, meat-eating Homo was presumed smart enough to have harnessed fire and to have also benefited from its use to ward off predators and cook meat and other foods.

On the shoulders of giants 

By 1990, Brain had closed down excavations at Swartkrans. But the new decade would see the introduction of a wave of cutting-edge technologies brought to bear on paleoanthropological questions. One of the biggest advances came in the study of the chemistry of human tooth enamel, which showed that, contrary to expectations, Paranthropus robustus actually had a varied diet, not restricted to the types of foods predicted by the dietary hypothesis. Different types of plants utilize different varieties, or isotopes, of carbon during photosynthesis, creating distinct isotopic signatures in their tissues. These unique signatures are transferred through the food chain to consumers of those plants and to consumers of the plant-eaters and so forth. Bottom-line: the rugged construction of the Paranthropus robustus skull and teeth, built to devour tough, low-quality foods, belies its actually very eclectic diet. Most specialists now believe that the ape-man’s extreme anatomy is not a reflection of its day-to-day diet, but was an adaptation for consuming less-desired foods when better, higher-quality ones were unobtainable—a good thing indeed, but one that was not readily apparent when scientists were restricted to hypothesizing about subsistence based solely on anatomy.

So, here we find ourselves as the stewards of Swartkrans Cave since 2006—overseeing research at a site that has produced an embarrassment of paleoanthropological riches, from bone and stone tools, to some of the earliest evidence of humanly controlled fire in the world, to the oldest humanly butchered bones in southern Africa, to hundreds of fossils of two distinct ancient human species. Our current work is focused on exploring new areas of the site and its older deposits; on better understanding the processes that formed the site; and especially on developing a clearer understanding of the interrelationships and ecological separation (and overlap) of Paranthropus robustus and early Homo. The presence of these two contemporary and broadly adapted human species prohibits the simple inferences that characterized earlier studies about the authorship of the site’s abundant and important archaeological traces. Our task is thus exceptionally challenging, but also eminently invigorating and gratifying.

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Suggested reading

Brain CK. 1981. The Hunters or the Hunted? An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brain CK (editor). 2004. Swartkrans: A Cave’s Chronicle of Early Man, 2^nd Edition. Pretoria: Transvaal Museum.

Pickering TR, Schick K, Toth N (editors). 2007. Breathing Life into Fossils: Taphonomic Studies in Honor of C.K. (Bob) Brain. Bloomington (IN): Stone Age Institute Press.

Pickering TR and Heaton JL. 2009. Roots, bugs and venison: prehistoric cuisine at Swartkrans Cave. Quest 5: 3-9.

Ungar P, Sponheimer M. 2011. The diets of early hominins. Science 334: 190-193.

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 * Australian-born anatomist and paleoanthropologist Raymond Arthur Dart (1893-1988), a professor and dean at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1925-1943, was best known for his 1924 discovery of fossil remains of Australopithecus africanus. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Wikimedia Commons

** Portrait of Robert Broom. Wikimedia Commons

No one could have predicted this. 

While excavating among Medieval period ruins in 1983 near the town of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, archaeologists encountered a jaw-dropping find. They had uncovered a partial set of fossilized teeth belonging to a rhinoceros — an ancient type that made its home thousands of miles away in places like present-day Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa. 

The scientists were scratching their heads.

It just didn’t fit.

More fossils followed — mammoth, giraffe, saber-toothed cat. Clearly they had opened a door to a time long before anything they had come to expect from their excavations at Dmanisi. They were suddenly digging into a slice of the Early Pleistocene, between 1 million and 2 million years ago—when Europe’s environment was like that seen today in east and southern Africa.

But the excavators’ surprising encounters didn’t stop with animal fossils. Next came stones. Thousands of them. They were clearly shaped with intent, and not by nature. These bits of stone resembled in remarkable detail the kinds of simple stone tools first uncovered by Louis and Mary Leakey during the 1930’s at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. This was the very first human tool industry, known as the Oldowan, the advent of which is now generally accepted by scientists to have occurred about 2.6 million years ago.

So, here was the smoking gun. There must have been some form of human here contemporaneous with these ancient animals.

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Shaking Up the Old Guard

It wasn’t until 1991 that workers at Dmanisi discovered the first direct evidence of a human presence within the Pleistocene layers. It was a fossilized mandible (the lower jaw), and it appeared to be human—but quite different from a modern human mandible. It was more like what scientists had been finding for decades in East and South Africa—fossils of what paleoanthropologists know to be some of the earliest members of our kind—genus Homo—human ancestors that lived between 1 million and 2 million years ago. Geographically, this fossil appeared to be several thousands of miles off course. 

Even more remarkable finds were uncovered in 1999 — two similar skulls emerged. Two years later, a third. Then a fourth. One of the skulls had no teeth, only gums. Further examination showed that the individual had suffered an illness and had been toothless for about two years prior to death. How could such an individual survive in the comparatively harsher life conditions that must have existed almost 2 million years ago? Was this person cared for in sickness, as we do our fellow humans today?

These new finds were turning some widely accepted theories of human evolution on their heads. 

“The prevailing view was that humans did not leave Africa until about 1 million years ago,” said David Lordkipanidze, paleoanthropologist and Director of the Georgian National Museum.* He has been directing the excavations at Dmanisi for decades. He and his colleagues have dated the new Homo fossils to about 1.8 million years ago using the latest dating technologies. Moreover, the morphology (physical characteristics) of the Dmanisi fossils seemed to be clearly ancestral to the later Homo erectus human species that had long been thought the first global colonizers. The Dmanisi specimens exhibited affinities to the earlier Homo habilis and Homo ergaster finds uncovered at African locations. And the stone tools were Oldowan — the simplest industry — not the more sophisticated Acheulean handaxe technology that at least some scientists contended was required to enable early humans to exit their African environment and survive as a global species. 

In the time-honored fashion, Lordkipanidze’s discoveries were immediately met with controversy. “One group of scientists accepted [our interpretation], but mostly people were skeptical,” he said.* 

With time, however, his discoveries at Dmanisi have joined the “who’s who” of fossil humans, and the research he and his team are doing today stands at the cutting edge of work in human evolution. Dmanisi is widely regarded as one of the world’s earliest early Homo sites outside of Africa.

But, Lordkipanidze and his colleagues were not through shaking things up in the world of human evolution.

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Aerial view of the Dmanisi excavation site (foreground) and medieval town. Courtesy Fernando Javier Urquijo

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Skull 5

While excavating at Dmanisi in 2005, Lordkipanidze and his team uncovered yet another remarkably well-preserved early Homo fossil. Designated as specimen ‘D4500′, it turned out to be the matching cranium to another fossil find uncovered 5 years earlier — a complete mandible they designated ‘D2600’. These two fossils were discovered alongside the remains of the four other early Homo fossil skulls, animal fossils, and simple stone tools. Designated Skull 5, the new cranium together with its mandible display a relatively small braincase with a long face and large teeth. Other similar early Homo fossils, all found in African contexts, are either incomplete, or adolescent or younger individuals. According to Lordkipanidze and his associates, this new find constituted “the most complete adult skull known from Early Pleistocene Homo.“** Moreover, like some of the other finds, it was associated with other parts of the body that exhibited characteristics akin to Homo erectus body engineering, which closely approximates that of modern human morphology. In other words, this species had a very human-like body.

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The Dmanisi early Homo cranium (D4500) in situ. Courtesy Georgian National Museum

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 The Dmanisi D4500 early Homo cranium and a large rodent tooth in situ. Associated fauna, such as the tooth from a rodent species that lived 1.8 million years ago, helped to date the find. Courtesy Georgian National Museum

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The Dmanisi D4500 early Homo cranium and ancient herbivore fossil remains in situ. Courtesy Georgian National Museum

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 The complete Skull 5. Courtesy Guram Bumbiashvili, Georgian National Museum

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Skull 5 was another first. But the biggest revelation came not with the latest fossil, but with what the fossils collectively had to say about human evolution.

Now, with fossil finds that represented five distinct individuals, it was the first time that such an assembly of Early Homo fossils were found together within the same time and space context. No other site, in Africa or elsewhere, could boast of such a collection. The Dmanisi discoveries meant that scientists could study a range of variation in human species within the context of one place and time range, a relative mother lode of information that could potentially clarify, and perhaps even revolutionize, how we see these earliest of Homo human ancestors. 

The researchers set to work. And the result of their study was startling. Lordkipanidze and his colleagues summarize it well in the following words in their recent report published in Science: 

Geometric morphometric analysis and re-sampling statistics show that craniomandibular shape variation among the Dmanisi hominids is congruent with patterns and ranges of variation in chimpanzee and bonobo demes [a population of one species](Pan troglodytes troglodytes, P. t. verus, P. t. schweinfurthii, and P. paniscus) and in a global sample of H. sapiens. Within all groups, variation in cranial shape is mainly due to interindividual differences in size and orientation of the face relative to the braincase. The Dmanisi sample, including skull 5, thus represents normal within-deme variation, ranging from small-faced relatively orthognathic (typically female and/or subadult) individuals to large-faced relatively prognathic (typically male) individuals.**

In other words, after examining the remains, the research team concluded that the differences among these fossils vary no more than the differences between five modern humans or five chimpanzees. 

“Thanks to the relatively large Dmanisi sample, we see a lot of variation,” said Christoph Zollikofer from the Anthropological Institute and Museum in Zurich, Switzerland—a co-author of the Science report. “Had the braincase and the face of Skull 5 been found as separate fossils at different sites in Africa, they might have been attributed to different species.”

Historically, variations among Homo fossil finds in Africa and Asia have also been found, but these differences have never been found within the same spatial and time period context, and thus scientists have classified the various finds as belonging to separate species. But now, according to Lordkipanidze and his colleagues, what has previously been thought to be separate ancient human species — Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Homo ergaster, for example — may actually be variations or sub-species of one and the same species.

The upshot: Researchers need to re-adjust their thinking when determining how early Homo fossils are classified. 

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 Dmanisi Skulls 1-5 (left to right), showing the individual variations, and a Dmanisi landscape. Courtesy M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, University of Zurich, Switzerland

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The Erectus Ascendancy

The findings at Dmanisi compelled the researchers to propose a major overhaul of how these early Homo fossils fit into the larger scheme of human evolution, including the emergence of human ancestors from their African homelands. As Lordkipanidze et al. report:

When seen from the Dmanisi perspective, morphological diversity in the African fossil Homo record around 1.8 Ma probably reflects variation between demes of a single evolving lineage [emphasis added], which is appropriately named H. erectus……Specimens previously attributed to H. ergaster are thus sensibly classified as a chronosubspecies, H. erectus ergaster. The Dmanisi population probably originated from an Early Pleistocene expansion of the H. erectus lineage from Africa, so it is sensibly placed within H. e. ergaster and formally designated as H. e. e. georgicus to denote the geographic location of this deme.**

By this thinking, what Louis and Mary Leakey first uncovered at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania in 1960 would not be Homo habilis, but Homo erectus habilis, what Kamoya Kimeu and Alan Walker discovered at Lake Turkana, Kenya in 1984 would not simply be Homo ergaster (the famous “Turkana Boy”), but Homo erectus ergaster, and what Bernard Ngeneo found at Koobi Fora on the east side of Lake Turkana in 1972 was not Homo rudolfensis, it was Homo erectus rudolfensis.  

Most significantly, the evidence at Dmanisi, given its location and place in time, also implies something that challenges a long-standing paradigm in a big way: It was not the bigger-brained, bigger-bodied Homo erectus, with the more sophisticated Acheulean stone tools, that first ventured out of their native African comfort zone — it was the smaller-brained, smaller-bodied ones with the simple tools. And the exit out of Africa happened significantly earlier than previously thought. Scientists, these researchers suggest, will need to reconsider the elements required for early humans to become a global species.    

Paleoanthropology, however, like many other scientific fields, has proven to be a science where theories come and go. Lordkipanidze and his research colleagues would likely be among the first to admit that their conclusions from Dmanisi are wide open to debate and further testing through future finds and research, at Dmanisi and elsewhere. 

“Every year we are finding more and more,” says Lordkipanidze, “and we have excavated only 7 percent of the site.”*

That statement was made a few years ago. The percentage has gone up since then.

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* Lordkipanidze, David, “The First Humans Out of Africa”. Posted March 2012. TEDvideo, 15:27. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC0gdpVS4uM 

** David Lordkipanidze, et al., A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo, Science 342:326-331, 2013.

Cover Photo, Top Left: The five skulls of Dmanisi, against the backdrop of the Dmanisi area. Courtesy Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer, University of Zurich, Switzerland

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Lying beside the Phipot River about four hours drive from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, the quiet community of Chi Phat goes about life much like many other villages and communities in the Cambodian countryside. These people are mostly farmers, growing rice, bananas and other crops, and fishermen. But a large number of village families also participate in the Chi Phat Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) project, established about ten years ago with the help of a conservation organization. The ecotourism business offers a range of activities for those tourists who want the more unconventional experience of off-the-beaten-path activity and trekking — like morning bird-watching trips on the river, crab hunting at night, tree-planting, and trekking in the jungle. For those with special interests, such as archaeologists interested in the human past and things ancient, Chi Phat offers a special attraction – a chance to view the remains of a unique, ancient, mortuary ritual of a people still shrouded in mystery.

To see this, it often takes a journey on the back of a motorcycle along a trail so narrow that overhanging vegetation will scratch unprotected legs. The trail is at times so muddy that the rider must dismount to walk through leech-infested terrain, across fast-moving streams and slippery rocks, through clouds of butterflies, and near unsuspecting snakes. The trekker finally reaches a small clearing, to climb the rest of the way up a mountain to a wooden ladder. Here one encounters three high rock ledges. To explore the largest of them requires carefully crawling on hands and knees along a rock surface with a low ceiling above, inches away from the edge, a fall from which would surely mean an unsupported climber’s injury, if not death. Along the rock ledge surface are chipped stoneware jars containing bones, and what appear to be skillfully but simply crafted small wooden coffins with wooden lids. The bones within the jars are human. It is an ancient burial site.

Archaeologists have interpreted it as a secondary burial ritual mortuary site, one among 10 similar known sites distributed over 100 kilometers of the eastern ranges of Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains jungle environment. Secondary burials have been practiced by a variety of cultures throughout history. They are often described as rites in which the bones of the deceased are placed in urns, bone boxes, or other vessels after the flesh has been stripped from the bones by natural decomposition. This particular secondary burial site, known as Phnom Pel, is the closest one to Chi Phat, and it, along with several other such sites, have been the objects of intensive study by Dr. Nancy Beavan and a team of associates. Beavan is an expert in radiocarbon dating, based at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She has examined and dated bones from a multitude of burial sites across the globe, but there was something unique and compelling about the Phnom Pel finds and those of the other nine sites. Beavan has made it her mission to find answers.

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Map of Cambodia and the Cardamom Mountains region. Stars mark all 10 sites that have been geo-located during the project work. The distance between the southernmost and northernmost sites is about 72 km.  Map from Beavan, et al., 2012

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“I got a call from the documentary film-makers for National Geographic’s “Riddles of the Dead”[in 2003],” said Beavan, “who asked me if I could date a bone in 3 weeks. After I started to prepare the bone, I became rather curious because it looked so fresh. I got back in touch with them and they told me it was from Cambodia and from a burial site.”* The dating of the bone placed it during the time of the demise of the Khmer Empire in the mid-fifteenth century CE. That was the civilization that built the iconic temple structures of Angkor.

“I became absolutely fascinated”, she said.* 

That fascination drove Beavan to investigate the original context of the bone, a journey that eventually led to a full-scale study now financed under a $720,000 grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund.

It hasn’t been an easy journey. 

The site where the bone was found is known as Khnorng Sroal, a Cardamom Mountains site located high on a south-facing natural rock ledge. And like Phnom Pel and the other sites, access for extended study requires some extraordinary measures. Motorcycles must be used to negotiate narrow trails, rivers must be crossed, long hikes are required on rugged terrain. And then there is the climbing, as the sites are located on elevated rock ledges. “Instead of going to these places and collecting everything to take back to a comfy lab to work on,” says Beavan, “we live in the jungle for weeks at a time eating dried fish and dried sausages and rice, using this time to do all of our data collection in the field, and taking only tiny samples for scientific analysis, so that we can conserve and protect the sites in their original state.” At another site known as Phnom Khang Peung, 600 meters above seal level and deep in the jungle, they had to use a helicopter to bring in enough water and provisions, including people, to stay for two weeks of field work. “And helicopters are not cheap,” Beavan exclaims, “so that straightforward solution has only been used once!”

Two central questions have underpinned Beavan’s entire effort: Who were these people? And why did they “bury” their dead this way?  

Out From Oblivion

For obvious reasons, much of the archaeology and research on ancient Cambodia has focused on the more visible and spectacular sites of the Khmer Empire, arguably Southeast Asia’s greatest ancient civilization, whose temple builders dotted the landscape with wonders like Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. Flourishing from the ninth to fifteenth centuries CE, it dominated the region economically, culturally, and politically. Indeed, chronological and historical referencing in both popular literature and academic studies in the broader examination of Southeast Asia’s past have usually anchored around ‘before’, ‘during’ or ‘after’ Angkor. 

But there is something apart, unique and tantalizingly mysterious about these Cardamom Mountains rock ledge burials when compared to the better-known discoveries associated with Angkor. Beavan thinks they could tell a story of a forgotten highland people with a unique culture living on the margins of the Angkorian world during its waning days in the fifteenth century, and then long after it’s fall. She also suggests that, though their time overlapped with that of the end of Angkor, the mountain culture that created this funeral ritual was separate and distinct from Angkor. 

The first clue to this evolving story has to do with location. “The rugged terrain and isolation of the region has given it notoriety over the centuries as a place of refuge. The mountains have also been home to ethnic minorities who notably lived apart from the Khmer culture of the lowlands and were seen as “savages” and taken as slaves in Angkorian times,” writes Beavan and colleagues in an international publication in 2012. **

The second clue relates to the nature and unique combination of characteristics of the finds. Those sites, which Beavan has radiocarbon dated to between CE 1395 to 1650 using wood, tooth enamel and human bone samples from four sites, feature ritual use of 53 cm high stoneware storage jars containing human bones, and small coffins (averaging only about 1 meter in length), each much too small to accommodate a flesh and blood adult. The jars and coffins were placed together high on rock ledges or overhangs. The 50-53-cm-high stoneware jars used for the burials are known as Maenam Noi jars, made at the Maenam Noi kilns in the Singburi province along the Chao Phraya River in Thailand. These jars were in production from about the fourteenth to possibly the sixteenth centuries CE. The kilns are hundreds of miles distant from the region of the Cardamom sites. Says Beavan:

“There are at least 75 of these large storage jars among the 10 sites that we have located, and let me tell you, getting these things up into their mountain burial sites must have been a mission and a half. But they did, and they were very particular, too: only a certain type of storage jar, and then after having procured them and hauled them by some still unknown means into their mountain homelands, they used them simply to contain the bones of their dead, filling the jars with one or more skeletons.”

(Above right, a typical Maenam Noi stoneware jar used to contain the bones of the dead. Credit Tep Sokha).

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The secondary burial jars and coffins were placed high on rock ledges in the Cardamom Mountains. Photo Credit Tep Sokha

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Dr. Nancy Beavan sitting among the artifacts on the Phnom Khnang Peung site ledge. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

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A perspective view of the jars on a site rock ledge. Sitting in the background is Danni Eam, a member of the field team. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

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Mr. Gan, a long-time member of the team and a member of the Chong ethnic minority, sieves sediments on the jar ledge for artifacts. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

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And there is much more. Writes Beavan in the 2012 report:

“All of the burial jars appear to have been prepared by breaking away the rim to facilitate the emplacement of larger skeletal material such as entire skulls. A hole was drilled through the bottom of each jar, perhaps to ritually “kill” the vessel. The log coffins in the Phnom Pel, Damnak Samdech, and Khang Tathan sites are made of an as yet unidentified tree species, which is extremely dense and has a fine annual growth structure. The coffins vary in overall length between 90 to 178 cm, but their design is generally similar in that whole logs are cut into sections, the centers are carved out in squared corners, and each is topped by a lid, but there is no additional carving or decoration to the exterior. The exception to this, at one of the oldest sites, Khnang Tathan, is a single coffin of 210 cm, which has deep chevron carving on the ends of the coffin lid.”** 

In addition, the jars were found to contain green, yellow and blue glass beads, and simple bronze rings. The assemblages in all 10 sites also contained additional tradeware jars, bowls, and dishes, possibly used, according to the archaeological interpretation, for food offerings. Curiously, at every site Beavan and her team always found at least one 45-cm-high ceramic Angkorian jar, made at the Buriram kilns in an area bordering the western boundaries of present-day Cambodia and Thailand. In the twelfth-thirteenth centuries CE the Buriram kilns were part of the Angkorian kingdom. The Angkorian jars are significantly earlier than the more numerous Maenam Noi jars. “The Angkorian jars sort of stick out like a sore thumb,” Beavan told the Phnom Penh Post recently. “Why, if you are collecting Maenam Noi with such a passion, do you pop in one Angkorian jar? What does that mean?” Though Beavan suggests that these people were not associated with the lowland Angkorians, had there been any sort of an Angkorian connection? 

Perhaps. Yet most of the elements belie a cultural identity with Angkor. Write Beavan and her colleagues in their 2012 article:

“The ritual practices in the mountains are distinctive compared with what is known of lowland mortuary practices in the pre-Angkorian and Angkorian periods. What is especially remarkable about the Cardamom sites, and suggests much about their inter-relationship and the cultural similitude of those who created them, is the overall uniformity of the material aspects of the ritual for the dead. This uniformity includes such items as the small nautical tradeware bowls and plates that were possibly used for food offerings, the use of coffins in 3 of the 4 sites presented here, and the Maenam Noi jars used for the burials in all but the Khnang Tathan site.”** 

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Above and below: The ancients deposited the defleshed bones in modified Maenam Noi jars. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

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Dr. Nancy Beavan views and examines a coffin on a ledge. Credit Ouk Sokha

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Nancy with three types of coffins at a site. Ouk Sokha

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The body of a coffin, which also has a tight fitting lid (not shown). Note the detail in the simple carving of the rim designed to receive the equally well carved lid. They are simple designs, with no outer decoration, but the craftsmanship of the people who made them is evident in the fine edges and the fit of the lids. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

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To be sure, the general use of jars for secondary burials is not unique to these sites. The practice has been found at a number of ancient sites throughout Southeast Asia, including locations in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Okinawa, Borneo, Mindanao, and the Phillipines, to name a few. But those “jar burial” practices consist of the literal burial of the jar in the earth. The Cardamom Mountain ritual is among the few anywhere with jars set out upon the ground or in rock niches. The ceramic jars from Thailand’s Maenam Noi kilns used by the ancient tribes of the Cardamom Mountains, according to Louise Cort, curator for ceramics at the Freer and Sackler museums of Asian art in Washington, DC., were the “all purpose containers at a time when there weren’t other alternatives” – they were used to store everything from rice and indigo to sulfur for gunpowder and even textiles (so that insects couldn’t get to them). The jars were also used as containers for commercial goods that were shipped and traded from Siam throughout Asia, reaching as far as Japan. “They are very commonplace jars,” Cort said. “But what’s interesting is how these jars were moved and acquired and then taken up into the mountains.”

Some light was shed on this in 2006 near Cambodia’s Koh S’dech Island off the coast of Koh Kong Province in the southwestern Cardamom Mountains, when fishermen began pulling these same jars out of the sea. Further investigations by Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture showed that they had actually uncovered a medieval shipwreck, yielding 900 pieces of pottery in two recovery dives. Most of the cargo’s pottery consisted of Maenam Noi storage jars, exactly like the Cardamon bone burial jars, as well as examples of other types of ceramic ware of the period. Either it was a ship carrying only empty jars, or it was transporting another commodity inside the jars, Cort says. The discovery has led the researchers to suggest that the highland people identified with the jar and coffin burial sites may have exchanged forest products, such as wood, cardamom, and elephant tusks, for the jars and then brought them inland in river boats. Beavan cites the historical record of Zhou Daguan, a Chinese emissary who visited Angkor in the thirteenth century, who commented on how “mountain ethnic groups collected and sold exotic and desirable forest products such as resin, elephant tusks, and cardamom; these products would have been sought by supracultural traders.”** The shipwreck’s discovery underscored another distinction between these highland people and the people of Angkor — they used different trade routes. If the trade theory is correct, “the people of the Cardamom Mountains got their jars through a maritime trade connection in the Gulf of Thailand that the Angkorian people didn’t have,” according to Beavan. “The Angkorians used mainly overland trade routes, and possibly river systems. The Angkorians also created their own ceramics; the people of the Cardamoms appear not to have had any such ceramic tradition, as only tradeware has ever been found among the sites.” 

Clues from the Living

Often the stories of living descendants or people who later settled the area of an archaeological site can provide some hints or insights that archaeologists can use to help interpret the material finds in the field. Beavan and her team have made a point of ensuring that what ethnologists and the current local inhabitants have said about the jars and their past play a role in helping to understand who these highland people were, and why they practiced this unique mortuary ritual and burial practice.  

French ethnographers Marie Martin and Jean Ellul conducted studies of the current Cardamom highland inhabitants decades ago, and recorded stories from the people there of “bones in caves”, bones they thought belonged to the “people of the court” of Longvek, (a trading port on the Tonle river just north of present-day Phnom Penh) who had fled a Thai invasion in 1593. The site to which they referred was located in the Cardamom range flanking Kampong Speau province. But it was further investigated by Ellul and Roland Mourer, a French archaeologist, who concluded that associated remains, consisting of simple glass beads and metal rings, likely did not represent those of a high-status group or royalty and thus these people would not have been good candidates for the “people of the court”. 

“For some reason they did not comment on the ceramics,” says Beavan, “but perhaps they did not realize they were looking at a very uncommon ceramics collection! And then, the researchers simply walked away from this quite unusual burial site, and the story of their single visit is recorded only by Marie Martin writing about her pre-1975 research in the Cardamom Mountains.”

Other oral traditions mention a “Chong Empire” that predated that of the Khmer. Its capital was said to be located near the town of Chanthaburi in Thailand. One legend has it that a people known as the Pear/Por of Kulen, north of Angkor, emigrated to the Cardamoms and discovered a cardamom spice called kravanh, a substance used in divine offerings during the eleventh century. Among thje legends, the Samre people of the Pursat Province also mention a Chong Empire that preceded the Khmer. 

Were the ‘people of the jars’ a remnant of the Chong Empire, or somehow connected to them? There is no evidence to suggest this. And other than the single twelfth-thirteenth century Angkorian jar from the Buriram kilns that archaeologists have found at each of the Cardamom burial sites, there is nothing to suggest any real connection to Angkor or its people.

Beyond investigating known sites, archaeologists are also looking for new ones — the Cardamoms stretch for 20,000 square kilometers, and large areas still haven’t been surveyed. To find the sites and learn more about them, they are collecting stories about the jars from villagers. Finding people whose families are originally from the Cardamoms is not easy because during the Khmer Rouge period villages were forcefully relocated to different parts of the country — so much so that in Chi Phat probably as few as 10 percent of the inhabitants have family who lived in the area before Pol Pot’s regime.

Still, some locals maintain a connection to the sites.

On several visits to the mountain ledges, researchers came across candle wax and plastic bags. Once, scientists even encountered a group of 20 villagers who made a three-day trek on foot to offer food and incense to the bones. It is not clear whether these people have an ancestral connection to the site. Regardless, researchers are interested in interviewing the locals.

“We try to collect old stories, even old myths because sometimes in a myth there is a grain of memory,” says Beavan. 

But the mystery remains. 

A Race Against Time

Whether or not Beavan and her team ever find all of the answers they are looking for, one thing is certain — their time is running out. Like so many other verdant rainforest and mountain habitats and regions across the globe, the natural riches of the Cardamom Mountains region are in danger of disappearing at an ever-accelerating pace. Modern development has already taken its toll. Bulldozing and deforestation have left red-earth scars where once stood relatively untouched rainforest. Along with the wildlife and vegetation, any human cultural remains, like those of the jar and coffin ritual burial sites, will go with them, if not protected.

“There is a lot of illegal looting still going on,” Beavan says, “and economic land concessions, which turn the foothills into sugarcane and rubber plantations; hydroelectric schemes which flood valleys; black market trade in precious wood species; poaching of some of the world’s most endangered species; elephants and other wildlife being squeezed out of their natural ranges.”***

Beavan believes she has about 5 years to run with her project before it is too late, unless something is done to preserve the known sites as well as any future sites they may discover. She is now working with the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts to develop a heritage protection plan, hoping to buy more time.

And plenty of time is what it takes if archaeologists expect to get more than a few scraps and clues about who these people were and how they related to the larger context of Cambodian history and culture during the final years and aftermath of the Khmer Empire. Thus, like any project of an archaeological nature, the work is characteristically slow, but the mystery is compelling. 

“Despite the work that has now spanned some ten years,” says Beavan, “we still do not know exactly who these people were, or where their burial practice came from. Did they make it up themselves? Did they get the idea from vaguely similar practices of other mountain people in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand and if so, how did that happen?”

So Beavan and her colleagues liken their work to piecing together a giant jigsaw puzzle, but without the benefit of the box lid that illustrates the complete picture. And most of the pieces may never be found.

In the end, they can only hope that enough of the picture will eventually materialize to tell a story of an enigmatic highland people who, long forgotten in the shadow of Angkor, lived their lives on the margin.

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* Nancy Beavan, “Burial Practices in the Cardamom Mountains,” interviewed by Kathryn Ryan, Nine to Noon, Radio New Zealand, July 20, 2012.

** Nancy Beavan, et al., “Radiocarbon Dates from Jar and Coffin Burials of the Cardamom Mountains Reveal a Unique Mortuary Ritual in Cambodia’s Late-to-Post-Angkor Period (15th-17th Centuries AD)”; Radiocarbon, 54: 1-22, 2012.

*** Nancy Beavan, “Burial Practices in the Cardamom Mountains,” interviewed by Kathryn Ryan, Nine to Noon, Radio New Zealand, July 20, 2012. Also includes statements to Popular Archaeology.

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A Lab in the Jungle

Much of the work of Beavan’s team is done in the field at the sites where the finds exist. There, the artifacts are recorded, mapped, measured, collected, sorted and examined. Thus, with the exception of sampling for radiocarbon dating where special equipment and facilities are required, they eschew a comfortable lab to study and work on all of the artifacts on site. “We live in the jungle for weeks at a time eating dried fish and dried sausages and rice, using the field time to do all of our data collection in the field, and taking only tiny samples for scientific analysis, so that we can conserve and protect the sites in their original state,” Beavan related to Popular Archaeology. Conservation takes place concurrent with the scientific work they perform at the site. For example, fragments of some of the ceramic ware that lay on the surface of the rock ledges, such as that of the Maenam Noir jars, were carefully pieced together onsite, an activity that in archaeology is normally done in museum or university conservation laboratories.

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Above, Tep Sokha and Danni Eam, responsible for the ceramic conservation work of the research team, reconstruct one jar that was broken into more than 160 pieces. All of this conservation work takes place in the middle of the jungle. Sokha has reconstructed dozens of burial jars and bowls, piecing them together like a puzzle. He doesn’t remove anything from the rock ledge – doing so would mean destroying the jar cemetery – so he places the reconstructed jars back on the ledge in the position where the fragments were found. He then photographs them to record their appearance. Says Beavan, “Mr. Tep is an extraordinary ceramic conservator. He can take a large jar broken into more than a hundred pieces and put it back together in the middle of the jungle on cliff edges. And one of his findings is that in those ancient times, people were also trying to mend their broken jars. Mr. Tep found two jars where broken pieces had been fixed anciently using natural tree resins.” Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

Above, Tep Sokha, the chief ceramics conservator, with a skull. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

Above, Mr. Gan, a member of the field research team, piecing together broken jars. Photo Credit Nancy Beavan

Above, Dr. Sian Halcrow (right), Chief Bioarchaeologist for the project, and Stacey Ward at work at their bone analysis station in the midst of the jungle.

Dr. Halcrow’s research on the bones suggests that the people who were buried in the jars did not die a violent death — their bones give no indication of that. The skeletal remains range in age from preterm infants and babies to older adults, including a skull that belonged to a woman who lived long enough to lose all her teeth in old age.

One of her most interesting discoveries relates to the teeth of the dead: many of the skulls have had the two lateral incisors – the teeth on the left and right of the two central teeth – removed. She believes that these teeth were pulled out deliberately – either as a sign of tribal affiliation or for beautification. According to Halcrow, pulling out teeth or changing how they look — by filing to give them a different shape or by removing teeth in a certain pattern — is a ritual that was last shown to have been practiced by lowland peoples in the Cambodian region around 200 CE. There is no mention of this practice in Angkor, however. 

Halcrow also thinks that members of this tribe probably consumed significant quantities of rice, and that they did not eat much fibrous food, as the teeth do not show the signs of wear typical of fiber-rich food consumption. 

Surprisingly, she also found some evidence among the bones of scurvy, a disease that results from lack of Vitamin C in the diet. This is unusual because these people lived in a jungle environment rich in fruits which contain high amounts of Vitamin C.

Photo Credit Nancy Beavan. 

Dr. Halcrow at her jungle workstation for skeletal analysis. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

Dr. Halcrow and Dr. Beavan sorting through the bone from one of the jars. Photo Credit Ouk Sokha

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At first blush, anyone peering at the site from a distance might think it is a construction site. There are workers scattered about well-defined, squared-off open earthen pits and partial walls of stone blocks. Many of them are crouched down, close to the soil, appearing more like gardeners than construction workers. But some of them are wearing hard hats. There are sandbags placed in line at select locations, appearing to define work areas and spaces both shallow and steep. The area is fenced off, and it overlooks a busy road, traffic passing by with drivers mostly oblivious to what is happening in this place.

But if one looks closer, a very different picture emerges. 

This is an archaeological excavation, and most of the “construction workers” are actually students and volunteers, along with a few professionally trained archaeologists and other specialists. Since 2007, these workers have been carefully and methodically peeling away layers of earth and stone and other debris in an effort to detect and reveal ancient walls, floors, and artifacts that have remained buried for hundreds if not thousands of years. Directing the operation is Shimon Gibson, a British-born Israeli archaeologist and adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is also a Senior Associate Fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. He, along with co-director James Tabor, a well-known scholar of early Christianity and Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is excavating an area adjacent to and below the southern Old City wall of Jerusalem. Referred to as the Mount Zion excavation because of its location in the sacred elevated area at the center of ancient Jerusalem near the historical Temple Mount (see map above), the work here is important because it is unearthing evidence of people who played out history in this place for thousands of years. It is set near a number of significant places in the history of this ancient city, such as the Praetorium where Jesus was tried before Pontius Pilate; the presumed location of the Last Supper of Jesus; the House of Caiaphas and those of other priestly families who lived during the time of Jesus; the large Nea Ekklesia of the Theotokos Church that Emperor Justinian commissioned in the 6th century and that was situated just above the site; and fortifications of the Crusaders and the Ayyubids.

History and location are not the only factors that distinguish the site. It is also remarkably well preserved, due at least in part to construction work during Byzantine times. That construction required the establishment of an artificial leveling fill of stones, soil and other debris atop the remains of older Early Roman period house structures as a foundation to support new buildings. Then, construction of the Nea Church in the 6th century required excavation of underground reservoirs and the earth and stone from those excavations were subsequently dumped over the earlier Byzantine constructions. 

“The area got submerged, ” Gibson said. “That’s why we found an unusually well-preserved set of stratigraphic levels.”*

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Above, the Mount Zion dig site, and below, the site looking north with modern, Islamic, Byzantine, and Early Roman period layers exposed. Courtesy Shimon Gibson  

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Digging the Priestly Upper Crust?  

This isn’t the first time archaeologists have investigated this location. In the 1970’s, Magen Broshi of the Israel Museum conducted excavations on Mount Zion in at least several areas, and then in 2000 and 2005, excavations were resumed to record data from the earlier excavations and to clarify the site chronology in terms of the historical occupation of the site from the Second Temple period through to the Ottoman level. It became clear from these efforts that the site still held enormous potential. Renewed excavations began here in large measure in 2007 under a license from the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Parks Authority and the sponsoring auspices of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  

Archaeologists have now uncovered evidence of an urban occupation going back before the destruction of the Jewish First Temple, when Judahite kings ruled the city. “The earliest finds uncovered in the recent excavations are from the Iron Age II (eighth- sixth centuries B.C.E.), but nothing was found in situ, and building remains from this period have yet to be uncovered,” writes Gibson in a 2010 report. “A layer of soil was uncovered at one location above bedrock containing large quantities of Iron Age II pottery; its significance will be investigated in future seasons of work at the site.”**

But as the excavation progressed, the finds that generated the biggest splash in the popular press related to the Early Roman period and the 1st century CE, and more particularly the Herodian period (the time of Herod the Great). 

Wrote Gibson:

“The basement of a well preserved dwelling was uncovered dating from the Early Roman period, with associated finds dating from the first century C.E. It included a plastered cistern, a stepped and plastered ritual bathing pool (mikveh) with a well preserved barrel-vaulted ceiling, and a chamber containing three bread ovens (tabuns)…….Numerous finds from the Early Roman period were found, including pottery, lamps, stone vessels (including a qalal jar rim with egg-and-dart decoration), scale-weights, murex shells, and coins. A fragment of an ornate window screen made of stone was also found. In fills situated above the rubble collapse of 70 C.E. there were a few Tenth Legion stamped roof tiles, but there were no signs of any construction activities in the area from the Late Roman period. The Early Roman period dwelling appears to have remained in ruins until the Byzantine period.”**

Both Gibson and Tabor knew they were on to something very significant. This was a residence that included its own cistern, its own mikveh, a barrel-vaulted ceiling, a chamber with three bread ovens, and part of an ornate window screen — not the stuff of a commoner’s home. Given the location of the structure not far from the most sacred spot in 1st century Jerusalem — the Second Temple — and the presence of what appeared to be a possible personal household mikveh – could they be looking at a Herodian period residence of a wealthy or important person, perhaps in some way connected to the Temple? 

Gibson and Tabor suggest that this may indeed be the case. 

Tabor hypothesizes one step further: “Caiaphas’s house has been located. It’s up on the hill just a few hundred yards from our site……..Caiaphas is the son-in-law of Anas, [who] had seven sons who were high priests, starting from before Jesus all the way down to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. So he ran the show for about 50-60 years, putting his sons in one after another, and finally a son-in-law, Caiaphas. My guess would be that we’re in one of the homes of that extended priestly family……”****

The large collection of murex shells could also be telling. The murex is a genus of Mediterranean sea snail that was used to produce a purple dye, highly valued by members of the aristocracy in the Roman world for coloring their clothing. It represented a mark of distinction for royalty and members of the upper classes of society.

“This color was highly desired,” said Gibson. “The dye industry seems to be something that was supervised by the priestly class for the priestly vestments and for other aspects of clothing which were vital for those who wished to officiate in the capital precincts.”*

Gibson theorizes that the shells may have been used as a means to identify varying grades of dye, as this can differ from species to species of the snail. Perhaps the priests were involved in the industry in some way, and if so, this says something new about the lives of these people – something that is not apparent in the historical record and that could only have been discovered through the archaeological process.  

“It is significant that these are household activities which may have been undertaken by the priests,” Gibson said. “If so, it tells us a lot more about the priests than we knew before. We know from the writings of Josephus Flavius and later rabbinical texts about their activities in the area of the Jewish temple, but there is hardly any information about their priestly activities outside the holy precinct. This is new information, and that is quite exciting. We might find in future seasons further aspects of industries which were supervised by these priestly families.”*

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Looking down into the area of the basement of the Herodian period house. Courtesy Shimon Gibson

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 The bread ovens, found in the basement of the house. Courtesy Shimon Gibson

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The stepped ritual bathing pool, or mikveh, found in the basement of the house. Courtesy Shimon Gibson

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A finding in 2009 added more grist to their interpretation.

“Among the special finds from the 2009 season of excavations was a soft white limestone cup dating from the first century C.E. bearing an incised inscription, with ten or perhaps eleven lines of script on its sides,” wrote Gibson.** 

The cup (pictured left) was found in four pieces within a fill layer containing 1st century pottery fragments above a barrel-vaulted ceiling of a mikveh. It represented a well-known type of 1st century cup found in excavations throughout Jerusalem and beyond. The inscription on the cup has not yet been completely and definitively translated, but study of the cup and the historical context of its finding suggests that it might have been a ritual cleansing cup, used for the washing of hands before engaging in liturgical functions. Suggests Gibson, “the discovery of the cup in the area of the Upper City of Jerusalem, in which priestly families are known to have resided (including the Qatros family), may hint at the original priestly function that this specific vessel had some two thousand years ago.”**

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A detailed examination of the inscription was made by Stephen Pfann, the staff epigrapher, using special photographic enhancing methods (PTM/RTI imaging) in order to clarify the fine spidery writing and to exclude accidental marks and incisions. 

Pfann’s study has shown that there are ten, or possibly even eleven, lines of script visible on the vessel, with the rest of the facets filled up with zig-zag lines, perhaps intentionally in order to ensure that no further script might be added to the vessel. Pfann has identified three different scripts in the inscription: (1) a script previously known from the Dead Sea Scrolls as “Cryptic A” script (Pfann also calls this “Hebrew Hieratic”); (2) an unknown cryptic script which is unique to this specific inscription, even though some letters bear a resemblance to cryptic letters and signs already known in the Dead Sea Scrolls; and (3) the standard Jewish/Aramaic square script of the period (with only a few words evident in lines 5-6). Another interesting feature is the appearance of repeated letters: he (appearing four times in line 4), yud (appearing four times in line 7), waw (appearing four times in line 7), and tsade (appearing four times in line 10). Were these letters written without purpose, or did each one of these letters signify a repeated musical notation or prayer?

Clearly the scribe who made this inscription did not want it to be easily read, and to that end this person deliberately did not provide word dividers and intentionally wrote a text with a variety of scripts. Interestingly, Pfann has suggested that lines 5-6 might even be a paraphrasing of Psalm 26:8, and the words “Adonai shavti…” are fairly clear, even if the rest is not.

—- Shimon Gibson, excerpts from Preliminary Report: New Excavations on Mount Zion in Jerusalem and an Inscribed Stone Cup/Mug from the Second Temple Period **  Image courtesy Shimon Gibson

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Then, in 2013, they made yet another major discovery. 

While continuing to excavate near the mikveh within the building basement, they uncovered a vaulted chamber that contained what appeared to be a well-defined plastered bathtub. It was among only three other such Second Temple period rooms found so far in Israel. Two of them were in palaces of Herod the Great. Gibson believes that the addition of the bathroom feature is a clear sign of wealth and status.

“The bathroom is very important because hitherto, except for Jerusalem, it is usually found within palace complexes, associated with the rulers of the country,” Gibson said.”We have examples of bathrooms of this kind mainly in palatial buildings.”*

A nearly identical bathroom was found through previous excavations in the Jewish Quarter of the city. It is, according to Gibson, “only a stone’s throw away”. “The building in the Jewish Quarter is similar in characteristics to our own with an inscription of a priestly family,” Gibson added. “The working theory is that we’re dealing [here] also with a priestly family.”* 

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The house “bathroom”. Note the bathtub to the left. Courtesy Shimon Gibson

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Cisterns and Hiding Places

As previously mentioned, among the uncovered features of the residence is a large, 30-foot deep oval-shaped cistern. As 1st century CE cisterns in Old Jerusalem go, there was nothing initially unusual about it. But this one contained a few surprising finds — cooking pots, charcoal, evidence of burn marks, storage jars, and remains of an oven.

In 1st century Jerusalem, cisterns, often public access facilities, were in common use among the city’s inhabitants as a means to collect and store water, a highly valuable commodity in Judea’s dry climate. So what were these objects doing at the bottom of a cistern? Would the residents have simply discarded them there once they became unusable, like depositing trash into a garbage dump? As precious as clean water cisterns must have been to the inhabitants of Jerusalem in this environment, it would be an unlikely scenario.

But Gibson and Tabor suggest a possible explanation. 

“We still need to look at this material very carefully and be absolutely certain of our conclusions, but it might be that these are the remnants of a kitchen in use by Jews hiding from the Romans,” said Gibson. “Their last resort was to go into these cisterns. It was a common practice, but this conclusion is theoretical. It makes for a very good story and it does look that way, but we’ve got to be certain.”*

Historically, subterranean features such as cisterns and tunnels were used by the Jews to escape the pursuit of the Romans during the First Jewish Revolt. Flavius Josephus, for example, in The Jewish War, writes the following:

One John, a leader of the rebels, along with his brother Simon, who were found starved to death in the cisterns and water systems that ran under the city. Over 2000 bodies found in the various underground chambers, most dead from starvation. (Josephus, War 6:429-433)

Moreover, not far from the Mount Zion site, archaeologists excavating in the ancient Ophel area near the Temple Mount (or Haram Ash-Sharif) of Jerusalem have uncovered a plaster-lined cave with an associated system of subterranean tunnels. Under the direction of Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University, excavators removed uncounted bucket-loads of dirt and rock fill from the cave, discovering in the process that its walls had been lined with a layer of plaster. The cave also appeared to be connected to a structure dated to the First Temple period (10th to 6th centuries BCE) above it, which featured water channels for directing water into the cave. This suggested to the archaeologists that they were actually exploring what was originally an ancient water cistern. But this cave excavation revealed some surprises. Says Brent Nagtegaal, an excavation supervisor, “we started to find a layer that related to the time just following Herod the Great during the Herodian Period. We were quite surprised that we would find stratified layers inside this cistern, and as we went underneath them we started to find walls, walls that indicate that there was some type of occupation or at least construction that took place inside the cistern after the cistern had lost its use for water.”*** Excavators found that the Herodian Period walls related to yet another key feature of the cave or cistern — a system of tunnels carved from the rock, large enough to accommodate the passage of individuals from one location to another. Continues Nagtegaal: “You can see many signs of life in here. You can see chisel marks that exist on the walls which really indicate the direction at which the tunnels were constructed, and you can see holes where candles would have been placed and their burn marks. You also see little foot steps and handholds in vertical shafts.”***  The tunnels also revealed numerous shards of Herodian Period pottery, a ceramic type used to date the tunnels and shafts.

So was the cistern with the cooking pots and oven excavated by Gibson and Tabor’s team actually part of the same story?

The jury is still out on this interpretation, but as Gibson notes, “it makes for a very good story”. 

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 Co-director James Tabor descends into the cistern. Photo credit Lori Woodall

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Cleaning out the cistern, student excavator kneels by a 2,000-year-old cooking pot. Photo credit Lori Woodall

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A tile fragment recovered during the excavations. The tile fragment shows the stamp of the 10th Roman Legion. This legion fought and occupied Jerusalem and Judea during the time of the First Jewish Revolt, the time when many Jerusalem residents took up hiding in subterranean tunnels and cisterns. Photo credit Lori Woodall

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Moving Forward 

The Mount Zion excavations are really about much more than the 1st century world of Judaism and Christianity. In addition to the Iron Age II and Early Roman period layers, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a strong Byzantine presence and strata representing Islamic cultures from the Umayyad through the Ottoman periods (the 7th to 12th centuries CE). Finds have included a threshold to a gate dating back to Saladin. “Here, in this site,” said Gibson, referring to the Islamic layers, “we have three superimposed levels — belonging to the Umayyads (seventh to mid eighth centuries), Abbasids (mid-eighth to ninth centuries) and Fatimids (ninth to eleventh centuries)– which allow us to reconstruct the cultural life in the houses from these periods.”* 

The excavations are expected to continue for at least two or three more seasons. Much can happen in that time. Only a fraction of the site has been excavated thus far, and as so often happens in archaeology, theories and hypotheses can be challenged or overturned. In terms of the 1st century finds, Tabor makes clear that what the team is uncovering is not about a single find or discovery. “It’s not necessarily one house,” he says. “We’re uncovering a significant area of 1st century Jerusalem. The big news [of the latest, 2013 season] is the bath. But it’s what the bath really means. What it means is that we have significant areas of well-preserved material where we are. The bath is just the beginning……..”****

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Individuals interested in learning more about the Mount Zion excavations and/or who wish to participate financially may go to the UNC website.  Additional direction for individuals interested in participating as dig volunteers may go to the Dig Mount Zion website for more information. This website also includes more in-depth information about the excavations, finds, and history.

The UNC Charlotte dig, licensed by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Parks Authority, is the only archaeological excavation in Jerusalem currently being conducted under the leading sponsorship of an American university. While the 2013 excavations have been completed, work is expected to continue on the site during the summers of 2014 and 2015. The work was made possible through the generous support of The Friends of Mount Zion, a group of private funders organized by the Office of Development at UNC Charlotte. Other assistance was provided by the University of the Holy Land and The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology.

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* University of North Carolina press release, James Hathaway, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 17 September 2013

** Gibson, Shimon, Preliminary Report: New Excavations on Mount Zion in Jerusalem and an Inscribed Stone Cup/Mug from the Second Temple Period, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and University of the Holy Land, Jerusalem, 2010.

*** Archaeologists Excavate Jerusalem Cave and Tunnel Network, Popular Archaeology Magazine, Vol. 11, June 2013.

**** UNC Charlotte Mount Zion Excavation, Charlotte Talks, WFAE 90.7, 1 August 2013. 

Map image of Mount Zion excavations location courtesy Shimon Gibson and Mount Zion Excavations Project.

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