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Now that the Qumran Project has essentially concluded its task of overseeing the publication of the complete Dead Sea Scrolls material by Oxford University Press, an opportunity has arisen for the Centre to facilitate new areas of research related to the archaeology of the Levant and the biblical world. Levantine archaeology complements the tradition of Dead Sea Scroll research at the Centre and is in many respects the only field that can produce ‘new’ sources of data on the biblical world and the ancient Near East. While the Ashmolean Museum has a fine collection of archaeological materials from the Levant and ancient Near East, these artifacts come mostly from excavations carried out early in the twentieth century when the precise provenance of finds was often not recorded, resulting in the loss of information on their social significance. There is also little room at the Ashmolean to incorporate important new archaeological materials.
It is in this spirit that the Centre has established the Oxford Levantine Archaeology Laboratory at the Leopold Muller Memorial Library. Professor Thomas Levy, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has been appointed Visiting Director of the new laboratory. He is also director of the UCSD Judaic Studies Program, and it is hoped that the new laboratory will promote research- and teaching-synergies between the University of California and the University of Oxford.
Two projects are already in place in Yarnton. The first involves the participation of Professor Andrew Sherratt, of the School of Archaeology of the University of Oxford and curator of the European prehistoric collections in the Ashmolean Museum. It was he who suggested that the first domestic animals may have been used not for their ‘secondary products’ (milk, wool, hair and traction), but for meat, and that milking and the exploitation of other secondary animal products become part of prehistoric farming practices only around 4000 BCE. This socio-economic transition helped promote social evolutionary changes such as the birth of pastoral nomadic communities, the emergence of the Mediterranean farming economy and the rise of complex State-level societies.
The Oxford Levantine Archaeology laboratory has provided pottery sherds from vessels found in Israel’s Negev desert dating from c. 4500-4000 BCE to test Sherratt’s ‘secondary-products-revolution’ hypothesis by analysing residues for evidence of milk. The samples are currently being tested in Professor Richard Evershed’s Biogeochemistry Research Centre at the University of Bristol.
The other current project concerns the high-precision radiocarbon dating of material from the Iron Age (c. 1200-586 BCE) in the southern Levant. Carbon samples from Professor Levy’s recent excavations at the Iron Age metal-production site of Khirbat en Nahas in Jordan, carried out jointly by UCSD, Dr Mohammad Najjar of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and Dr Russell Adams (McMaster University, Canada), provide an important assemblage of dating materials to examine the rise of the kingdom of Edom. The Hebrew Bible contains evidence about this Iron Age polity from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE, but until recently there have been few high-precision radiocarbon datings that can be used to establish an objective chronology for the area, one of ancient Israel’s most important neighbours. The new Oxford Laboratory is involved with a radiocarbon-dating project in collaboration with Dr Tom Higham of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art, University of Oxford. This research promises to go a long way towards solving the dating problems of biblical Edom.
The OCHJS plans to co-host an international conference on radiocarbon dating and the Iron Age of the Southern Levant in September 2004 to highlight this research.
The academic year 2002-03 saw the publication of M. G. Abegg, Jr, with J. E. Bowley and E. M. Cook, in consultation with E. Tov, The Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance I. The Non-Biblical Texts from Qumran (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003). The appearance of this concordance, an addition to the thirty-seven volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series covering all the non-biblical texts found at Qumran, was partly supported by the Centre.
(For further information about the Qumran project, please follow this
link)
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