Found in Jerusalem: One Earring, 2000 years later. And 12,000 ago, a shaman laid to rest

One large pearl inlaid in gold with two drop pieces, each with an emerald and pearl.
Anybody seen the other one?

This lucky find is described in Haaretz The lady's earring was discovered during excavation of the ruins of a Byzantine era building, dating from around the fifth century A.D. It was discovered outside the old city walls, beyond the Kotel, near Silwan and the so-called City of David.

Well, there is ancient and then there is well and truly old. The discovery of shamaness in the Galilee, buried hunched, 50 tortoise shells ritually surrounding the tomb must be rife with symbolism. She's like the first Jewish mother, someone quipped. The female force, the she-Eve.

Female Shaman's Grave Found in Israel
Tuesday, November 04, 2008

By Jeanna Bryner

The grave of an elderly woman buried about 12,000 years ago included a plethora of animal remains.


A 12,000-year-old burial site in Israel contains offerings that include 50 tortoise shells and a human foot, and appears to be one of the earliest known graves of a female shaman.

The remains were discovered in a small cave called Hilazon Tachtit, which functioned as a burial site for at least 28 individuals. The grave woman, likely a shaman, was separated from the other bodies by a circular wall of stones.

Other grave goodies buried within that wall included tail vertebrae from an extinct type of cattle called an auroch, skulls from two stone martens (members of the weasel family), bony wing parts from a golden eagle, the forearm of a wild boar and a nearly complete pelvis from a leopard.

"What was unusual here was there were so many different parts of different animals that were unusual, that were clearly put there on purpose," said researcher Natalie Munro, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Connecticut.

Great pains were likely taken long ago to collect the animal remains for the grave, not to mention the long trek that must have been made from the closest domestic site at the time, about 6 miles (10 km) away, say the researchers.

This care along with the animal parts point to the grave belonging to both an important member of the society and possibly a healer called a shaman, the researchers conclude in their research published this week by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Such healers mediate between the human and spirit worlds, often summoning the help of animal spirits along their quests, according to the researchers.

Life was tough

The woman was about 45 years old when she died and based on measurements of the skull and long bone, she stood at about 4.9 feet (1.5 meters).

Wearing of her teeth and other aging signs on the bones suggested the woman was relatively old for her time. And she likely had a limp or dragged her foot, the researchers speculate, due to the fusion of the coccyx and sacrum along with deformations of the pelvis and lower vertebrae.

The human foot lying alongside the body came from an adult individual who was much larger than the women.

"What's interesting is it's only the foot," Munro told LiveScience. "She hasn't been disturbed, but a part of another human body was definitely put into the grave. It could be related to the fact they were moving body parts around sometimes, but we don't know why."

At least 10 large stones had been placed on the head, pelvis and arms of the buried individual, which the researchers suggest helped to protect the body and keep it in a specific position, or possibly to hold the body in its grave.

Scattered around the body and beneath it were tortoise shells. Before arranging the shells inside the grave during the burial ritual, humans cracked open the tortoise shells along the reptiles' bellies (so as not to crack the back part of the shell) and sucked out the meat, possibly for food.

"So they took the insides out by breaking the belly, but they left the back intact and that was probably meaningful," Munro said.

Rituals begin

The woman was part of the Natufian culture, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived from 15,000 to about 11,500 years ago in the area that now includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The finding is particularly interesting since the Natufians were on the verge of becoming a more sedentary, farming society.

Finding an early shaman grave during this transition makes sense, Munro said.

"With the beginning of agriculture we seem to see an intensified ritual behavior," Munro said. "When things change dramatically, people tend to try to reestablish the legitimate order of things by using ritual and religion to deal with change."

She added, "These people are starting to live in more permanent communities; they're in more contact with one another from day to day. It's not surprising that we start to see evidence for those ritualized behaviors at this point in time."

Copyright © 2008 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved.

This is a topic that Izzy will research further. But first, a close look at that lovely stray jewel set in burnished gold.

Who knew? Harry Potter's Jewish

Here's a funny take on an up-country wedding, Orthodox-style, from a friend named Nate,who has been visiting from Manhattan.

Adam Melech is from California, but his temporal home, today, is the Galilee town of Safed, home to stoners and Sufis and people like himself—somewhat ecstatic Hasidic mystics. Separating himself from the whisky-fueled merriment all around, he takes me aside to share something important: "See this wedding?" says Adam, gesturing to the gathered crowd. "This is like Bill and Fleur's wedding."

Bill and Fleur? From Harry Potter?

"That's right. Almost anything you need to know about Jews, you can learn from Harry Potter."

It might have been the jet lag, or the Bushmills, or the fact that I don't sing and can't dance, but my cousin's wedding, in an artists' colony in western Galilee, had left me feeling a little disjointed. Like most clean-shaven agnostic half-Jews, I get slightly nervous around Hasidim, perhaps because we can't both be right about life. And though my cousin is of mixed-blood, like me, and was never particularly religious, his wedding guests included real-deal Hasids: Ultra-Orthodox men chanting and praying and rocking back and forth, in their fedora hats and tzitzit strings hanging around their waist.

Most of them, it turns out, are Americans who weren't even born into Hasidic families. (They call themselves bal-chuva— "those who return" to the faith.) Emboldened by drink and by their warmth, I take the opportunity to ask the questions I'd always wanted to ask about Hasidism: What is it like? Why the clothes? I don't quite understand some of the more thoughtful answers about the second coming of Moses and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. But I know Harry Potter, even if I never saw its Jewish significance.

Adam moves to enlighten me, offering an amazingly complete dual cosmology of Harry Potter and the Chosen People. Jews, he explains, are the wizards. The non-Jews are the muggles. And Israel's wizards are engaged in a kind of invisible spiritual warfare (just like in Rowling's books) that most muggles can't even see, much less understand. Rowling may be a muggle, says Adam, but she knew what she was doing. Why else would a yeshiva like Hogwart's be so central to their lives? Why would the power of naming and names be so important to both Jews and wizards? He offers further corollaries: Harry's spells are talmudic prayers; Hizballah are the Death-eaters; converts to Judaism are muggle-born wizards; and so on. He breaks the news that I'm actually just a mudblood — a muggle, not a wizard, because my muggle mother had converted to Reform Judaism, not Orthodox. But I shouldn't despair, he says. There are good muggles and bad muggles, just as there are good and bad wizards. I could still play a (somewhat diminished) role in fighting evil.

"Jesus," I answer. "This is all pretty heavy."

He winces. "Whoah! You said it."

"Said what?"

"That name. Him"

"Oh, I get it. Jesus: he who must not be named."

Adam winces again, but nods. I'm getting the hang of this. We have another drink.

A couple of days later, I called Rabbi Dr. Chaim Pollock, Dean of Foreign Students at the Michlalah Jerusalem College, whom I had read had also used the Harry Potter analogy. He seemed somewhat embarrassed that I was asking him about the topic. "Harry Potter is fiction," he said. He had never suggested that it spoke to the Jewish experience specifically. He had just defended its emphasis on good and evil back when a lot of religious leaders were denouncing the books as occult. "The following, I think I can tell you," he said, warming slightly to the topic. "Rowling is an astute observer of society. [Hasidim] have their inner truth, and inner logic," just as Rowling's world does.

Rabbi Pollock was cautious, of course — likening an ancient religion to children's fiction may not be particularly prudent in a country that is home to more holy sites and razor wire than anywhere on earth.

But here in Galilee — where Druze and Arab villages perch on the same scrubby ridgelines as Jewish towns, all within easy reach of Hizballah rockets, and the region's peoples continue to squabble over the mantle of historic victimhood — young Americans committed to God and Zion may find comfort in a world of Death-eaters and wizards.

Bill and Fleur's wedding, you may recall, was attacked by deatheaters. But this wedding night was uneventful — even the lights of the Druze and Arab villages twinkled benignly in the hills. At one point in the evening, a gregarious Lubavitcher named Shalom Pasternak, who sings in a band he created with my cousin called Kabbalah Dream Orchestra, was helping my cousin dispense shots of whisky and blessings to his friends and family. With his beautiful bride, and — let's face it — some fascinating friends, he was every bit the Half-Blood Prince. We were all glad to see it, wizard and muggle alike.

(Note that although the Galilee is definitely within Katyusha range, there have not been rocket firings in this region since the 2nd Lebanon War in 2006, so this is a bit of bogus bravery on the part of young Nate, a Time magazine whizkid.) Mazel Tov

Bush had been otherwise occupied--now let us prey, er, pray

George Bush, the lame duck American president on tour in Jerusalem and the West Bank, has today urged Israelis to "end the occupation" This carefully coded turn of phrase sounds like criticism, but it is aimed at Palestinian politicians, to show the US wants concessions from all players. Bush also stressed that all infrastructure of terror must be dismantled inside the territories. When his flacks spoke about signing a peace treaty before his term ends, there was a smattering of applause. At least one more flying visit to the region is on the cards before Bush hands over power to his successor next January. Will this treaty yield anything tangible? Conflict seems so ingrained here.
Earlier, Bethlehem was disrupted when Bush choppered in to pray at the Church of the Nativity.

Snipers patrolled the roof of the church near a hanging plastic Santa Claus left over from Christmas, while Bush remained inside for under an hour. There was no longer any trace of the Bethlehem bedlam which arose when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests duked it out inside the walls of the Church of the Nativity last week. The dispute was about how to clean the holy house after the Christmas rush. Palestinian police broke up the ruckus-- but only after brooms and stones started flying. Four people – out of around fifty who are suspected to be involved in the melee – were reported wounded.
Young supporters of Bush today were shushed by security cops when they tried to cheer. Like many Texan Christians who visit the Holy Land, Bush intends to trace the footsteps of Jesus Christ, whom he once described as his favourite philosopher and whose teachings he says have informed his presidency, including his divisive foreign policies.

On Friday Bush will fly north to the Galilee, where Jesus delivered many of his best known lines, including the Sermon on the Mount in which he said "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God".

All the flagwaving on these tours has an unfortunate connotation: the Lena Riefesntahl aesthetic, which is best avoided in a country like Israel which abhors that German regime responsible for the holocaust. Less is more, even on stage, guys. One flag each is enough. Those lines of soggy stars and stripes and Magen Davids lining the main streets already look sad and discarded. There must be a better way. (Maybe projected images?) Israelity bites