Excavating a Vineyard: Problems and Solutions (20 min)

Presenters

Simeon D. Ehrlich, Fulbright/Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

Excavation of a Philistine cemetery at Ashkelon on the south coast of Israel from 2013–2016 revealed 200+ individuals, some of whose burials were disturbed by Roman activity. The excavators interpreted the regularly sized Roman disturbances at set intervals, together with the absence of Roman architecture, as indications of agricultural activity, specifically, a vineyard.

Four problems frustrate this interpretation. (1) Evidence: absent any ecofactual evidence of grapes or any of the infrastructure more readily identifiable as evidence of viticulture, the interpretation remained tenuous. (2) Comparanda: most archaeological comparanda come from western Europe where different viticultural practices were used in antiquity. (3) Texts: most ancient agricultural treatises predate the integration of Judaea/Palestina into the Roman Empire and consequently, do not cover its style of vine growing in depth. (4) Stratigraphy: models of depositional processes used to interpret other contexts at Ashkelon yield illogical results when applied to this agricultural setting.

This paper offers a revised framework for the interpretation of agricultural contexts. It does so by beginning with descriptions of vine tending from agricultural treatises and papyrological contracts on vineyard maintenance in order to understand the operations affecting the soil of a vineyard. This allows for a more nuanced model of stratigraphic deposition and the formation processes of the archaeological record in an agricultural context, which differs markedly from the architectural and sepulchral contexts more familiar to excavators.

Using this new model together with archaeological comparanda and a modern scientific understanding of viticulture, it is possible to demonstrate with a high degree of certainty that the disturbances to the Philistine cemetery at Ashkelon do indeed represent a Roman vineyard. This is significant as it is the first Roman vineyard in the Levant identified from its vine pits and offers best practices for the identification and excavation of such contexts elsewhere.