Jerusalem and the Holy Land(fill)
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“Garbage is among humanity’s prodigious physical legacies to those who are yet to be born.”1
If this statement applies to all cities on earth, it is nowhere more relevant than to ancient Jerusalem. The city’s continued occupation since the Early Bronze Age (c. 3000–2800 B.C.E.) has resulted in more than five millennia of trash. And while these discarded remains can be discovered beneath the surface of the entire city, immeasurable tons of smashed pottery vessels, animal bones, coins, charcoal, seeds, glass fragments, and other items curiously appear to have been amassed together in Early Roman Jerusalem (first century B.C.E. 038to the first century C.E.) to form what seems to be one of the world’s earliest landfills.
While Jerusalem may be a shining city on a hill, the designation of that holy hill’s slopes for the city’s garbage disposal completely altered the landscape of Jerusalem’s eastern border, the Kidron Valley and for centuries left the western slopes of the Kidron uninhabited, outside of the developed city and its walls. In fact, only in the latter part of the 20th century C.E. did these slopes, which are the eastern slopes of the ancient City of David and the modern Silwan neighborhood, once again become inhabited. This means that for nearly 2,000 years, the western slopes of the Kidron remained unpopulated.
Many archaeologists working in Jerusalem over the past century have avoided these layers because they are an archaeological gamble. Digging steep slopes demands a considerable investment of time and energy; what they might contain is unknown, and their potential value was not well understood. And after all, it’s garbage! The ancient residents threw the contents of this area away for a reason. What possible good could come from digging in 2,000-year-old trash?
Our present excavation at the eastern slopes of Jerusalem’s Southeastern Hill (Area D3)—also known as the “City of David” and present day “Silwan,” in an area that today is part of the City of David National Park—puts the spotlight on these layers of Jerusalem’s ancient garbage.
One thing has not changed since antiquity—people produce waste. Things that our ancient predecessors threw away, such as food, furniture, goods, and supplies, are a reflection of their daily lives and habits.
Jerusalem during the first century C.E. was a place of political turbulence and social unrest that eventually culminated in its destruction in the year 70 C.E. This was also a time of growth when Jerusalem swelled to an unprecedented size, expanding to include three sectors—the Upper city, Bezetha,2 and the Lower city. Economically and politically, 039the city revolved around the Temple as local and international pilgrimage—unique to the Temple in Jerusalem—continued to grow, reaching its zenith during the first century C.E. The garbage layers on Jerusalem’s eastern slopes, in some places more than 36 feet thick, are a silent witness to those glorious but troubled times. If excavated correctly, we hypothesized that the garbage layers could potentially shed light on the dietary habits, trading practices, and vocational diversity of the ancient residents of Jerusalem.
The immense layers of the landfill as counted by archaeologist Ronny Reich3 were observed by each of the 16 excavators of the City of David. Most of them ignored the layers and attempted to bypass them in their excavations. The phenomenon of landfill circumvention was so impressive that it was recorded on the plans of early 19th-century explorers such as Conrad Schick and Raymond Weill.4 They were quick to recognize the fact that the landfill layers 040date to the Roman period. The late archaeologist Yigal Shiloh, who was the first to excavate these layers, claimed that although the layers’ contents dated to the Early Roman period, their formation should be dated a few decades later to the era following the city’s destruction in 70 C.E. According to this interpretation, Roman soldiers cleared the contents of the destroyed and deserted Jewish houses down the slope as they prepared the ground for the rebuilding of the city.5
The first to interpret the layers as a landfill—that is, an intentional garbage disposal—were Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron in their excavations by the Gihon Spring and again later in their cooperation with Guy Bar-Oz and Ram Buchnick during an in-depth study of the landfill content, especially of the animal bones. Their study led them not only to identify the layers as garbage, but to go one step further and associate the garbage with cultic activities performed at the Temple Mount and in association with pilgrimage to the Temple. Thus, this garbage provides a window into worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.
In October 2013, we began a long-term excavation project—conducted by the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority—on the Southeastern Hill. Our first year of the excavations was devoted to researching the landfill and developing a rigorous methodology so that the facts behind the garbage would be reliable. Two main challenges had to be 041overcome: First, how do we process the massive amount of dirt in the landfill? This process alone could easily consume all of our time and resources. The second challenge involved navigating the sharp slope. We realized that the landfill is composed of at least 11 distinct layers and that these layers slope downhill sharply from west to east. Given the steep slope and the density of the finds, it became quite difficult to peel off each layer separately. We developed a four-stage sampling strategy to overcome the two challenges:
Stage 1: Two regularly sized excavation squares (4 by 6 m) were excavated from the surface down. From these, one out of every 20 buckets of fill was removed and subjected to wet sifting (using a 0.5 mm mesh) in order to recover all finds that might be associated with the garbage. Finds collected in this way serve as a representative sample of the entire depth of the garbage layer, without distinction into layers. A metal detector was also employed regularly at this stage.
Stage 2: The sections of the square were sketched and photographed, and the distinct layers were marked with string to serve as guidelines for the subsequent stage of excavation.
Stage 3: Careful stratigraphic excavations were conducted on 1.5-by-0.5-meter segments of these sections, with the finds recovered from each distinct layer registered separately.
Stage 4: The buckets from each distinct layer were subjected to different methods of sifting: wet sifting (0.5 mm mesh), dry sifting (1 cm mesh), or flotation (i.e., using water to remove dirt from objects, allowing them to float and be separated). By doing this, we secured the retrieval of a representative sample of the variety of items making up the landfill.
Our systematic sifting proved to be valuable. We can also conclude with confidence the presence of materials that are now absent (like building stones) and scarce (like wooden beams or metal and glass objects). Such materials had secondary value and were typically recycled. So while we did not find many of them in the landfill, we found a lot of supporting evidence that they had been there at one time.
A team of specialists is still analyzing the finds, but a preliminary survey of the excavated objects has already revealed some interesting results. First, the 042overall nature of the assemblage, including the stone vessels, fragmented glass vessels, and decorated plaster pieces, dates broadly to the Early Roman period (63 B.C.E.–70 C.E.). More than 11,000 indicative pottery sherds also date mostly to the first century C.E., after the days of Herod (see “Broken Pots, Reconstructed Identities,” below, for more on the pottery).
We gained a more refined chronology in a study led by Yoav Farhi of the coins found in the excavation. Preliminary results show that most of the coins date to the days of the Roman prefects under the rule of Tiberius (15/16–31/32 C.E.). A second large group of coins dates to the days of Agrippa I (41/42 C.E.). Some earlier coins date to the days of the Hasmonean Dynasty (165–63 B.C.E.) and of Herod the Great (47–4 B.C.E.). These older coins were probably reused and stayed in circulation for decades. Missing from the assemblage so far are coins from the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 C.E.), and, apart from one coin dating to 54 C.E., there are no coins from the days of the procurators that governed over Judea during the decade that preceded the revolt.
The excavation of this area shows convincingly that it is made of repeated alternating material culture layers (i.e., layers with numerous discarded objects) sandwiched between layers much richer in soil. But in order to prove that this slope was a designated disposal site, specifically an ancient landfill, we had to answer two additional questions about these layers. First, could we identify the time intervals between individual layers? Was it weeks, months, or even years between each of the material layers?
Second, how and why were each of the soil layers formed? Are they due to the natural erosion of soil from the top of the hill, or were the soil layers deliberate acts by people intending to cover up the garbage? Answering these questions was key to determining whether this was a deliberate landfill or simply a place where garbage was dumped.
It is difficult to use pottery typology to reveal 043dates of decades or less. Numismatic evidence is helpful, but coins tended to stay in circulation for longer periods of time due to their value, and the analysis of the coins discovered in our excavation is still in progress. However, other pieces of evidence from our excavation indicate that this area was indeed a planned, intentional landfill.
Analysis of the animal bones from the site showed that the material layers were quickly covered by layers of dirt following their disposal in the landfill. We know this because there are relatively few bite marks from rodents and other scavengers on the bones in the material layers and because the bones are not weathered, meaning they did not blanch in the sun and open air—a process requiring a long period of time (see “The Jerusalem Diet,” below, for more on the bones). Furthermore, an unusually high percentage of the bones (14 percent) are burnt. This is higher than the typical percentage of burnt bones from domestic contexts. The garbage in our area had been intentionally burnt and was then quickly covered with soil.
The nature of the finds—almost all dating to the Early Roman period, their large size, and the near lack of large building materials—coupled with the finds’ assortment into layers, being burnt at the site, and possibly being covered quickly with soil, all demonstrate that these remains were not simply tossed downslope, but were instead the deliberate result of an organized, “industrial” garbage disposal process at the outskirts of the city. This area was designated as a city disposal site, specifically an ancient landfill, just outside of Jerusalem’s walls.
The nature of the massive amount of garbage 044concentrated at this site suggests the presence of an established, citywide garbage disposal operation that included the development of a specialized mode of collection and transportation to the top of the slope (a convoy of donkeys hauled the waste), the deliberate disposal of the garbage down the slope, setting the garbage on fire, and burying the remains beneath a layer of soil. The scale of work dictates that this waste management operation was a public enterprise. And while this may seem natural and vital for those of us living in the 21st century, this was not necessarily the case in antiquity.
Throughout history, those living in Jerusalem (and in other ancient cities for that matter) prior to the Roman period did not experience the luxury of a formal, citywide garbage disposal system. Jerusalem was already a large and densely populated city during the eighth–seventh centuries B.C.E., as it was during the Byzantine period (fourth–seventh centuries C.E.), and yet we find no evidence for an organized garbage disposal mechanism during those times. It seems that the first-century C.E. landfill of Jerusalem is a unique phenomenon, which demands an explanation.
One option is that the Roman procurators who governed Jerusalem during most of the first century C.E. developed the garbage disposal program. Recent evidence suggests the procurators developed an increasingly robust civic life. They encouraged and supported large public building projects such as the ceremonial “Stepped Street” and perhaps even the completion of the Temple Mount project initiated 045by Herod the Great in 19 B.C.E. These immense building projects also included the construction of a maze of drainage channels beneath the streets, including one running from the Ophel (just south of the Temple Mount southward) to the Siloam Pool.
It makes sense that the procurators were the inspiration behind the city’s waste management program, as it promoted civic life in Jerusalem by keeping the ever-growing city relatively clean. But why Jerusalem? Garbage was a problem in all Roman cities, yet we have no record of such operations in other cities like Caesarea or Scythopolis (Beth Shean). In Pompeii, garbage was simply discarded into the sewage channels. So why did Jerusalem receive this civic luxury?
We believe the Jewish population of the city, and specifically their unique religious practices during the first century C.E., may explain the presence of the landfill.
For Jews observing purity laws, clay vessels had to be broken and discarded, ritual baths (mikva’ot) became a necessity, and so on (see “?‘Pure’ Garbage—Limestone Vessel Remains,” below). Could it be that garbage was also considered ritually impure? We have no direct evidence of this, but we learn from later rabbinic sources that it was forbidden to discard waste within the city’s walls, and that garbage had to be taken out of the city.6
It seems that the landfill expresses an intercultural agreement between Jews and their Roman overlords. On the one hand, the Roman procurators brought with them knowledge and ideology of how a city should run and operate. On the other hand, Jewish leaders and local cultural traditions likely demanded patterns of behavior that encouraged civic purity programs in the growing city, such as garbage disposal. Ultimately, we can conclude that the Jewish concept of the ritual impurity of certain types of garbage drove the need to place it outside of the city—a task that was welcomed, organized, and performed by the Romans. The landfill therefore appears to070 be one example of a civic innovation brought about by bipartisan means for the mutual benefit of Jerusalem.
Excavations on Jerusalem’s Southeastern Hill—just outside the “City of David”—have exposed a landfill from the Early Roman period (first century B.C.E. to first century C.E.). This garbage provides insight into residents’ daily lives and habits during a politically, socially, and religiously tumultuous chapter of Jerusalem’s history—when Rome ruled, the Temple stood, and Jesus preached.
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Endnotes
1.
William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2001), p. 4.
3.
Ronny Reich, Excavating the City of David: Where Jerusalem’s History Began (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2011).
4.
Conrad Schick, “Namenliste und Erläuterungen zu Baurath Dr. C. Schick’s Karte der weiteren Umgebung von Jerusalem” (“List of names and explanations for Baurath Dr. C. Schick’s map of the wider area”), Zeitschrift des deutschen Palaestina-Vereins 19.3 (Leipzig: K Baedeker, 1896); Raymond Weill, La Cité de David (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1921).
5.
This view is still maintained by Alon de-Groot. See “Discussion and Conclusions” in Alon de-Groot and Hannah Bernick-Greenberg, eds., Excavations at the City of David 1978–1985 directed by Yigal Shiloh VIIA. Area E, Stratigraphy and Architecture: Text (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012), pp. 141–184. For a different interpretation, see Guy Bar-Oz, et al., “Holy Garbage’: A Quantitative Study of the City-Dump of Early Roman Jerusalem,” in Levant 39 (2007), pp. 1–12.