JERUSALEM, Dec. 10 (Xinhua) -- An excavation of an ancient village in the north of Israel has unearthed hundreds of artifacts linking the residents' upper class to Mesopotamia and other distant civilizations.
Archaeologist Yair Milevski, who headed the excavation together with Nimrod Getzov at the Ein Tzipori site, near Nazareth, told Xinhua Monday that this discovery helps understand Stone Age upper class society and commerce in the area.
"We discovered some kind of elite part of society that lived in this village and who were in contact with other cities in the northern Levant -- even in Anatolia and Mesopotamia," Milevski said.
The artifacts unearthed belong to the Calcolithic period, over seven millennia ago, and have been identified as a part of the local Wadi Rabah culture.
The find revealed that this culture had strong commercial ties with other cultures as distant as Mesopotamia and Anatolia, in current Turkey.
"This kind of commerce was not uncommon, but what's special is that we have a large collection of items in the same place, and most probably they were conducting these exchanges through terrestrial means," Milevsky said.
"We think that they had barter deals, because they didn't have money, and sometimes this exchange was coming from faraway sites since we also found items made from Obsidian coming from Anatolia and other parts of Turkey, as well as other items from Syria and northern Levant region," the researcher stressed.
Archaeologists believe that the luxury items discovered in Ein Tzipori were for the upper class's consumption and that the site was not a religious or affluent commercial settlement.
Among the artifacts are bowls containing hundreds of colored flint beads, engraved earthenware and palettes decorated with ostriches, showing influence from Mesopotamia and Syria.
"We know that there are few cases in the southern Levant with such patterns on palettes or other artifacts, even in the Near East. We believe there was a common background of ideas or beliefs that reflects continuous commercial activity," Milevsky said.
However, this part of the Ein Tzipor site that spans 200 square meters will be covered by a road in less than a year.
"That's why we call it a salvage excavation, because we dug to find what we could before it's covered by road 79, which leads to Nazareth," Milevsky said.
"The good news is that we will continue excavating other areas at Ein Tzipori, where we know there are other periods like the pre- pottery Neolithic (age), dating back more than 10,000 years in time," the researcher said.
Source: http://english.cntv.cn/20121211/100282.shtml
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