Christmas Cave
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| Christmas Cave | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Coordinates | 31.68, 35.42 |
| Site | |
| Type | Cave or rock shelter |
| Period | Chalcolithic and Roman |
| In use | From the Chalcolithic; a refuge in 73 and 135 CE[1] |
| Excavated | Found 1960; surveyed 2007[1] |
| Excavated by | John Allegro (1960); Roi Porat and Hanan Eshel (2007) |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Fibre or textile |
| Hemp DNA in rope and cloth made mainly of flax | |
| Dated | c. 3635 BCE – 130 CE |
| Dating | Radiocarbon |
| Identified by | Ancient DNA |
| Held by | Israel Antiquities Authority |
The Christmas Cave is a cave in the Qidron Valley in the Judean Desert, West Bank, near the western shore of the Dead Sea and Qumran.[1] Rope and cloth from the cave are made mainly of flax, but their DNA also includes that of hemp. Radiocarbon dating placed two of the pieces that carry hemp DNA in the fourth millennium BCE and a third in the first or second century CE.[1]
Site and finds
The cave takes its name from the day of its discovery by John Allegro in 1960. Roi Porat and Hanan Eshel surveyed it again in 2007 and found that its contents have no connection with the Qumran caves. In their account the cave was a refuge from the Chalcolithic onwards and again at the end of the Great Revolt in 73 CE and during the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE.[1][2]
The finds include textiles of wool and linen from several periods. The Qumran textiles are of linen only. Those of the Christmas Cave compare more closely with the textiles of Masada and the Cave of Letters.[1] Most of the rope found in the cave and at other sites in the region is of date-palm fibre, with some of goat and camel hair. A small share is of bast fibre, which had always been taken to be flax. Some of the cave's finds were published in 2003 among the textiles of Qumran, numbered "QCC" for "Qumran Christmas Cave".[1]
The rope and cloth were kept at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem from their discovery, examined at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and later moved to the Israel Antiquities Authority, whose National Treasures Collection holds them. They had been bundled in batches from different places in the cave.[1]
DNA analysis
Terence Murphy of the University of California, Davis and Nahum Ben-Yehuda of Bar-Ilan University tested five samples of cordage and five of cloth. Optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction had earlier identified flax in textiles from the Qumran area, but these methods separate flax from hemp with difficulty. They can also miss a minor fibre in a mixture.[1]
Each sample weighed between 0.04 and less than 0.01 grams and was ground to dust before its DNA was extracted. The team amplified a short stretch of the chloroplast gene rbcL by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). A longer stretch of 771 base pairs could not be amplified from the ancient material. The first attempts picked up DNA of a Salvia species that contaminated the laboratory. A fragment of 184 base pairs gave results.[1] The hemp form of this fragment carries a site that the restriction enzyme BamHI cuts, which the flax form lacks. Over 90 per cent of the fragment from a modern hemp control was cut, which gave a test for hemp in each sample.[1]
Sequencing confirmed that the DNA in every sample was mainly flax. Rope 931 carried a second base at all nine places where the flax and hemp sequences differ, which showed that it held a large amount of Cannabis DNA. Cloth 786 showed small peaks of the hemp bases. Fragments of a second chloroplast gene, trnL, gave hemp bands from rope 931 and from most of the cloth samples, 786 above all. A third gene, matK, could not be amplified from any of the ancient samples.[1] The cutting test found hemp DNA in all the ancient samples. A semi-quantitative PCR method put the amount at about a quarter of the flax DNA in rope 931 and about one four-thousandth in rope 928.[1]
Dating
In their preliminary report of 2010, Ben-Yehuda and Murphy thought that most or all of the samples dated from the Roman period. They left this to be tested by radiocarbon dating.[2] The Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory of the University of California, Irvine, then dated five samples. Three came from the first two centuries CE and two from the fourth millennium BCE.[1]
| Sample | Fibre (DNA) | Radiocarbon age (years BP) | Calibrated age (2σ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloth 440 | flax | 1870 ± 15 | 80–215 CE |
| Rope 928 | flax | 1950 ± 15 | 5–85 CE |
| Rope 931 | flax, hemp | 1900 ± 15 | 65–130 CE |
| Cloth 019 | flax, hemp | 4760 ± 15 | 3635–3520 BCE |
| Cloth 786 | flax, hemp | 4770 ± 15 | 3635–3525 BCE |
The authors call the older pair Chalcolithic in their abstract and of the Early Bronze period in their discussion.[1]
Interpretation
Murphy and colleagues held that rope 931 and cloth 786 most likely took in their hemp when they were made. The pieces with far smaller amounts might have picked up hemp dust while stored for centuries beside hemp goods or during excavation and transport if the bundles were tied with hemp twine. Their controls gave no sign of contamination in the laboratory. They argued that the absence of bands from modern hemp in the ancient samples "strongly suggests that the hemp DNA, whether incorporated deliberately or through contamination, was ancient".[1] They also compared the rbcL fragment of six fibre plants of the Old World: flax, hemp, date palm, cotton, abaca and ramie. Only hemp carries the BamHI site, from which they concluded that the cut fragments came from hemp.[1]
They set the results beside the rabbinic literature. The Mishnah, the Tosefta and the Jerusalem Talmud mention hemp as a textile fibre of little importance in the Land of Israel, similar to flax but inferior to it. Tractate Kilayim of the Mishnah names a blend of flax and hemp. The Jerusalem Talmud says that hemp garments were brought from overseas.[1] Because the cave was a refuge, the authors judged it unlikely that its rope and cloth were made there. They proposed Beth Shean, which Talmudic sources call a centre of flax growing and linen making, for the place of manufacture.[1] For the fourth-millennium pieces they wrote that the dates "confirm the suggestion of very old cultural activity and add the information that this activity included the use of hemp".[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 Murphy, Terence M.; Ben-Yehuda, Nahum; Taylor, R. E.; Southon, John R. (2011). "Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: talmudic background and DNA sequence identification". Journal of Archaeological Science. 38 (10): 2579–2588. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2011.05.004.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Ben-Yehuda, Nahum; Murphy, Terence (2010). "Rope from the Christmas Cave: in search of the Talmudic hemp". Archaeological Textiles Newsletter. 50: 14–19. doi:10.7146/atn.50.159260.