Talk:Tel Arad
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Tel Arad covers Tel Arad for the cannabis found in its Judahite shrine: the fortress and shrine, the two limestone altars, the residue analysis of 2020 and its authors' reading of it.
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Discussion
Sources
- Arie, Rosen and Namdar (2020), Tel Aviv 47: the excavation history, the shrine and the altars, the sampling, the GC-MS methods and results (Table 1, Figures 3 and 4), and the interpretation. Its supplementary Table S1, with the full peak annotations, is not in the printed article.
- No final report of the 1962–1967 excavation had been published by 2020. The article's account of the strata follows Herzog's interim report as Arie and colleagues summarise it.
Dates
- The residues are not directly dated. The date range is that of the shrine's two strata, X and IX, which Herzog and Singer-Avitz place from about 760/750 to about 715 BCE on stratigraphy and pottery. Aharoni had dated the shrine to five phases over about 350 years, from the 10th to the 7th century BCE.
- The authors suggest that the altars were in use for "a shorter period of a decade or two" within that span.
Points to note
- Site type. The mound held a fortress, and the cannabis comes from the shrine inside it. The site is typed by the context of the find.
- Residues. Only the heap on the larger altar was still well preserved when sampled; very little remained on the smaller altar. The authors suggest that the 1960s analysis may have used only the material from the smaller altar.
- Dung. The authors offer two readings of the urea and coprostanol derivative on the smaller altar: dung burnt as fuel, or faeces in contact with the altar after it was buried. Their conclusion takes the first.
- "Earliest". The article quotes the authors' claim that Arad is "the earliest evidence for the use of cannabis in the Ancient Near East" and does not restate it as a fact.
- Other finds cited by the authors. In discussing parallels, the paper dates the Yanghai cannabis to "700 BP"; the Yanghai sources give about 2500 to 2700 years. It also places the Beit Shemesh burial "in Jerusalem" with "a juglet with black material" near the skeletons, where Zias et al. (1993) describe a family tomb at Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem and carbonised material in the abdominal area. Neither point is used here.
Georeferencing
The coordinates (31.28, 35.13) are the mound as three gazetteers place it. Wikidata (Q2063578) gives 31.2808° N, 35.1250° E, and OpenStreetMap (node 278473085) 31.2799° N, 35.1255° E, about 0.1 km away. Pleiades (87764825) gives the same point as OpenStreetMap. Éloise 23:06, 29 October 2026 (+07)