More discoveries at Qumran

NOT, ALAS, MORE SCROLLS: Dead Sea Cave Yields New Finds (Popular Archaeology).

Led by Dr. Haim Cohen of Israel's Haifa University, a small team ascended a steep escarpment of rocky terrain to the cave each morning at 5.45 a.m. beginning on November 28 for several weeks of painstaking excavation. The routine climb took 2 hours to reach the excavation site, a cave where Cohen had previously conducted excavations in 2003 and 2006. Cave 27, also called the "Mikveh Cave" or Cave of the Pool at Nahal David, is best known for the Second Temple period (530 BCE to 70 CE) mikveh, or ritual cleansing pool, dated to the time of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. It was discovered and excavated just outside the cave entrance. The cave is located in a cliff approximately 400 meters above the Dead Sea and is accessible from a plateau above the cave. Among the many other finds excavated in past seasons were Early Roman period potsherds, flint tools, remains of straw matting, textiles, date pits, ropes, olive pits, animal bones, two coins of Agrippa I, a glass bottle, an iron trilobate arrowhead from the Early Roman period, a pottery seal with a geometric decoration considered to be from the Chalcolithic period, and an ashen hearth. The most intriguing questions, however, have surrounded the presence of the mikveh at the entrance to the cave, a relatively unusual location for such a feature.

Now, Cohen and his team have uncovered new artifacts and items that will add to their database of finds, a body of information or evidence that will help them answer some important questions about what the cave was used for, who may have inhabited or used the cave, and what significance the cave holds. Their most recent efforts have uncovered a large amount of pottery dated to the Second Temple period, and some dated to the Chalcolithic and Iron Age. Other finds included a few fragments of Roman period blown glass, identified as the base and rim pieces of perfume bottles; and an abundance of organic material such as twigs, branches of palm trees, animal bones, fragments of reed and straw, dates (one remarkably well preserved), rope, (including one knotted around a ceramic handle), fabric and leather, including a remarkably well preserved part of a sandal.

Via the Agade list and others.