Farmers find monastery beneath Israeli soil
Posted by John Malloy on 03/11/2009
After a group of Israeli farmers sought last year to expand their property in the hills near Jerusalem, they discovered an archeological gem beneath the dirt.
A team led by Daniel Ein Mor barely had to scratch the surface before finding the remains of a Byzantine monastery, he told CNN on Wednesday.
“The excavation at Nes-Harim supplements our knowledge about the nature of the Christian-Byzantine settlement in the rural areas between the main cities in this part of the country during the Byzantine period,” including Jerusalem, Mor said.
The church is believed to have been built in the late fifth or sixth century, and is decorated with “breathtakingly beautiful mosaics,” according to a description from the Israel Antiquities Authority, which hired Mor.
He said studying coins and pottery pieces will help determine the church’s age more accurately. Other monastic sites have been excavated in the region, which was part of the Byzantine Empire.
For Mor, who is studying for a master’s degree at the Institute of Archeology in Jerusalem, the excavation was a great opportunity because he already had been surveying nearby cliffs to document Byzantine monastic settlements where residents were cave-dwellers, he told CNN.
“So for me, it was fascinating,” he said, referring to the excavation. “It was very close to what I had been working on.”
The excavation site, surrounded by oak trees and farming terraces, is near Moshav Nes-Harim, 5 miles (8 kilometers) west of Jerusalem.
The digging began in November and is being done in phases, Mor said.
“Prior to the excavation, we discerned unusually large quantities of pottery shards from the Byzantine period and thousands of mosaic tesserae” scattered on the ground, he said.
The digging has been shallow, he said — reaching only about 7 feet (2 meters) deep. The highest preserved wall is only 4 feet (1.2 meters high). This is common, according to Mor, because over the centuries such monasteries have been plundered and their building stones reused.
The digging seems to mark the center of the site, which covers about 15 dunams, or four acres, along the slope of a spur that descends toward Nahal Dolev, according to Mor.
During the first few weeks, the team exposed the church’s narthex, the broad entrance at the front of the church, whose floor is covered with colorful mosaics in geometric patterns, he said…
www.cnn.com
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