A “unique” collection of “pearl caves” containing ancient archaeological finds has been discovered in an old tunnel.
The pearls are a type of ‘speleothem’ – minerals formed in caves by flowing water.
Unlike more commonly known speleothems like stalactites and stalagmites, cave pearls are generally spherical in shape and tend to hang loose from the floor, walls, or ceilings.
Usually less than 30cm wide, they’re found in shallow pools of water in limestone caves and form when layers of calcite stack up around a nucleus, often a fragment of rock or a bit of mud.
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What makes this find particularly exciting is that 14 of the pearls have a bit inside ’em – 14 of the pearls have some sort of hard lump coming from other objects – 8 of these have come from ceramic lamps – and 2 of the pearls, well, they’ve got a bit of plaster in ’em.
It’s the first time ever, researchers have found archaeological site treasures trapped inside cave pearls, the study shows.
‘Till this current study, cave pearls weren’t found in an archaeological context nor were they a focus of archaeological research,’ the study’s authors wrote.
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A spring tunnel is an old, man-made structure, built to access water from a type of underground rock layer called a perched aquifer.
The southern Levant is one of the longest and oldest spring tunnels in the southern Levant region, and it’s believed to have been built from the early 7th to the 8th centuries BC.
It may’ve been part of a king’s mansion.
The research team weren’t actually out looking for cave pearls initially – but stumbled upon an entrance to a sealed off part of the tunnel while conducting a survey back in 2017.
It was in this section, about 7m long and stacked with dirt and junk, that they found the pearls, and alongside them, an intact oil lamp, believed to come from the 3rd-4th centuries AD.
Most of the pottery nuclei have since been pegged to roughly the Hellenistic era (333-63BC), or the later Roman to Byzantine eras, which ran from 63BC right through to the 7th century AD.
The plaster cores have been dated back to the Hellenistic period.
One of the pottery samples, however, is thought to be even older, possibly dating back to the Persian or Babylonian periods, which preceded those dates, or even the time of the Iron Age in regional history.
The results indicate the tunnels were renovated during the Hellenistic era, lit by oil lamps.
But they also provide proof of the tunnels’ beginnings.
‘Our research confirms that the tunnel was built in its early days around 8th or 7th century BC.
‘Furthermore, it provides the first dating of the analysis of objects found in the pearls… that proves the tunnel passed through a stage of rebuilding during the Hellenistic period.’
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