Talk:Christmas Cave
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Christmas Cave covers the Christmas Cave in the Qidron Valley of the Judean Desert: the cave and its finds, the DNA analysis that found hemp in its rope and cloth, the radiocarbon dates of those pieces, and the authors' reading of the results against the rabbinic literature.
Data verification
Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Sources
- Murphy, Ben-Yehuda, Taylor and Southon (2011), Journal of Archaeological Science 38: the samples, the DNA methods and results, the five radiocarbon dates (Table 1), the interpretation and the rabbinic background. The freely available copy on eScholarship is the publisher's proof of May 2011, and its wording may differ in small ways from the printed article.
- Ben-Yehuda and Murphy (2010), Archaeological Textiles Newsletter 50: the preliminary report on the same samples, written before the radiocarbon dates were obtained.
- The survey reports of Porat, Eshel and Frumkin (2007, 2009) are in Hebrew. The article gives their findings on the cave's use as the 2010 and 2011 papers summarise them.
Source discrepancies
- Place. The cave is in the Judean Desert, in the West Bank. The title of the 2011 paper places it "in Israel". The article names the region and gives no country.
- Distance from Qumran. Both papers put the cave 1 km south of Qumran. The grid reference they print (Israel Cassini grid 189887/121095) converts to about 31.68° N, 35.42° E, some 7 km south-south-west of Khirbet Qumran. The article gives the converted grid reference, rounded to two decimals, and no distance.
- Period of the oldest pieces. The 2011 abstract and highlights call the two pieces of the fourth millennium BCE Chalcolithic; its discussion calls them Early Bronze and speaks of "three" dated samples from that period, where Table 1 has two. The article gives the radiocarbon dates and both period names.
- Cloth 786. The 2010 report found no hemp in the sequence of this sample; the 2011 paper reports small peaks of the hemp bases in its chromatogram and a hemp band with the trnL primers. The article follows the 2011 paper.
- Number of samples. The 2011 paper lists five cordage and seven textile accession numbers and says the study focused on five of each. The 2010 report lists sample 955 among the ropes, with a query, where the 2011 paper lists it as cloth. The article gives five and five.
- Where the rope was made. The 2010 report allows that rope could have been made in the cave; the 2011 paper judges it highly unlikely that a refuge cave was a place of manufacture. The article gives the 2011 view.
Georeferencing
The coordinates (31.68, 35.42) are the grid reference the papers print (Israel Cassini grid 189887/121095), converted. No gazetteer holds the cave: Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and Pleiades have no object for it. The point lies about 60 m below sea level in the Qidron valley, about 2 km west of Khirbet Mazin at the mouth of the valley. Éloise 23:08, 29 October 2026 (+07)