The announcement came in a video interview posted to the C14 YouTube channel, featuring Chaim Shakolnik, district director of the COGAT Archaeology Unit, and Dr. Gershon Bar-Kochva, a researcher at Orot Israel College in Hebron. The two researchers said they came across previously unknown photographs — old images of sections of the underground system beneath the Machpelah structure — taken during the only scientific exploration of the caves to date, conducted in 1919. “We saw photographs that were not known until now,” Shakolnik said, “and we understood that they reveal part of the system that Herod planned and executed when he built this complex.”The researchers drew on comparative architectual typology to conclude that the Machpelah structure is a burial complex. Reportedly, Carbon-14 tests have confirmed the Herodian date of the structure.
All very interesting, but let's see if it produces a peer-reviewed publication.
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