A Collection Of Cave Pearls Were Found In An Ancient Tunnel, With Some Containing Greek Artifacts
In an ancient tunnel, a collection of “cave pearls” was discovered, with some of them containing Greek artifacts from the Hellenistic era.
Cave pearls are a kind of “speleothem,” which is a geological formation made by mineral deposits that build up over time inside caves.
They are small and round, usually measuring between 0.1 millimeters and 30 centimeters across. They are mostly found in shallow pools of water filled with the mineral calcite and are not connected to the walls, floor, or ceiling of the cave.
A team of researchers stumbled upon 50 cave pearls in an underground water system in the Jerusalem Hills of Israel.
Previously, cave pearls have been detected on most continents, but they are rare in the Southern Levant region. The recently discovered collection is the largest ever found in the area.
Cave pearls typically form around a nucleus, such as animal bones, mud pieces, rocky fragments, wood shreds, and blue algae.
But some of the newfound cave pearls appear to have formed around archaeological artifacts. It is the first time that researchers have been able to identify such a phenomenon.
There are more than 210 spring tunnels in the Southern Levant. The research team had been conducting investigations in the Joweizeh spring tunnel in the Jerusalem Hills. The tunnel has two main sections and is more than 760 feet long.
It was built between 900 B.C.E. and 586 B.C.E. and was designed to remove water from perched aquifers. The tunnel was likely part of a royal mansion.
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The team had not been specifically looking for cave pearls. They were searching for an opening that led to a sealed section that separated from the main tunnel.
The new section was around 23 feet long and obstructed with soil and debris. Within this section, the archaeologists found the collection of cave pearls alongside an oil lamp that dated back to the third or fourth centuries A.D.
They performed analyses of the cave pearls and concluded that 14 out of 50 had formed around pottery shards.
Two of them originated from ceramic lamps, while two others were of ancient plaster pieces. Samples of charcoal extracted from the plaster dated back to the Hellenistic period between 333 and 63 B.C.
Most of the pottery nuclei also dated to the Hellenistic period or the later Roman and Byzantine periods. However, there was one shard that appeared to date all the way back to the Persian or Babylonian periods, possibly even the Iron Age.
The tunnel shows evidence of repeated use and repairs throughout the centuries. During the Hellenistic period, a reconstruction project occurred in the tunnel and was probably carried out by lamplight.
“Our research supports our understanding that the tunnel was first constructed in the Iron Age [around the 8th-7th centuries B.C.],” said Azriel Yechezkel, the lead author of the study with the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.
“Furthermore, it provides the first analytic dating of artifacts found in the pearls…that proves the tunnel went [through] a reconstruction phase during the Hellenistic period.”
The details of the study were published in Archaeometry.
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