A church floor may look like a terminus: stone, put in place to defend what is important, to deny time, to ensure that a place will be available to serve daily rite. Lifting that floor has made the opposite at the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulchre, making the location a readable cross-section of the deep past of the city.
Italian archeologists have been excavating under the basilica, in that position where received by the custodial communities as a part of the renovation-access, the Calvary and the tomb of Jesus are placed, according to tradition. Even the tiniest details, the traces of plants that suggest the appearance of the place before the time when it was transformed into the spiritual centre of so many lives, are among the most striking hints.
The outcome is not one discovery, but an array of information that renders the site newly dimensional-garden soil and quarry mutilations, pollen and walls, prayer activities and lab reconstructions.
1. Grape traces and pits of olives that lead to a garden
Examples of the soil under the church have provided evidence of 2,000-year-old olive trees and grapevines, indicating that some of the site was not bare rock, but agricultural plots. The discovery is significant in that it characterizes a landscape, which is green, worked, and enclosed, in a place that is more commonly conceptualized as being purely monumental. Viticulture and olive growing can also be included in the day-to-day economy of ancient Judea where small plots of land could be placed along the side of quarries, tombs, and the roadways.
2. A line of Gospel flung back botany
The Gospel of John has a garden close to the crucifixion and burial: Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which he was not yet buried. Director of the excavation Francesca Romana Stasolla linked such literary information to the object that the team is witnessing on the ground. The archaeobotanical results have been of particular interest to us, on account of what is stated in the Gospel of John, which adds: the Gospel talks of a green field between the Calvary and the tomb, and we recognized these cultivated fields.
3. Archaeobotany The work that the stonework can not do
Conventionally excavated sites tend to favor the features that stand the test of time, i.e. walls, floors, cut rock, pottery scatters. Archeobotany broadens the perspective by regarding seeds, pollen, and other microscopic residues as a form of environmental handwriting. Plant remains at the Holy Sepulchre can be used both to recreate the vegetation of the site, and how it was built up, with imported soils brought in, plots defined, and a living landscape giving way to subsequent sanctification. Practically, this writing relies on attentive sampling, control of contamination and laboratory examination of patients; the reward is a description of place that is seldom afforded by masonry.
4. Stone walls that were low and soiled-in soil redefining the land
An even more practical disclosure is the way in which the ancient hands rendered usable an irregular quarry edge. Stasolla related how it was done: low stone walls were used and the gap between them was filled with dirt.
That fact implies intentional terracing or plot-making an effort to make a doable ground in an inhospitable environment. It also describes how a site may evolve across various identities throughout its history: extraction pit, followed by cultivated patchwork, followed by burial zone, followed by church.
5. A hunt-shop of the Iron Age below the shrines
There is an older world beneath the church: a pursuit that goes back to the Iron Age (1200-586 B.C.). The marks of quarrying include cut faces, stepped voids, discarded stone, which are subsequently reused by successive generations of people rather than erased. In Jerusalem, forsaken quarries might be turned into peripheral tombs; the bottom has been hacked, and the walls hewn off. That prolonged prehistory contributes to the fact that a burial landscape might exist where extraction had been the purpose.
6. Shared custody and access to excavation through renovation
Below-floor archaeology came as a practical need, when a 19th-century floor had to be replaced. As Stasolla reported, the religious groups with the renovation works began to permit archaeological digs beneath the floor as well. The reality of the site, day-to-day activity, with several custodians, 24-hour devotion, and few hours in which evidence can be disrupted, influences all the aspects of evidence retrieval. The work is made in shifts and the whole team organization is organized based on such rhythm: “We work in shifts, and our team in Jerusalem is always 10 or 12 members, Stasolla said.
7. Virtual reconstruction of what is not visible in the field
Due to the impossibility of opening up the church at a time, the complete picture of the dig is constructed elsewhere. The off-site procedure as Stasolla put it: “Though we have not managed to see the entire excavated church at once, new technology is now permitting us to assemble the bigger picture in our laboratories. That method transforms haphazard trenches into organized space, bringing measurements, photographs, stratigraphic notes, and material analysis into models elucidating the relationship between layers. The outcome is not so much as one great dramatic revelation as a sort of low focal vision-setting the details in to place, until the evolving uses of a site can be read as a series and not as a disorder.
Where ceremony and memory usually carry the meaning, the new garden evidence offers another texture of meaning, the mundane task of tending the land, the labor of contriving small walls to create life next to death and stone.
Stasolla placed the bigger meaning into context, so that it was not diminished as testimony or theatricality: The true treasure we are uncovering is the history of the people who made it what it is by showing their faith here.
