Gilgal I ( he, גלגל) is an archaeological site in the Jordan Valley,

West Bank The West Bank ( ar, الضفة الغربية, translit=aḍ-Ḍiffah al-Ġarbiyyah; he, הגדה המערבית, translit=HaGadah HaMaʽaravit, also referred to by some Israelis as ) is a landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediter ...

, dated to the early

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...

period. The site is located north of ancient

Jericho Jericho ( ; ar, أريحا ; he, יְרִיחוֹ ) is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is located in the Jordan Valley, with the Jordan River to the east and Jerusalem to the west. It is the administrative seat of the Jericho ...

. The features and artifacts unearthed at Gilgal I shed important light on agriculture in the

Levant The Levant () is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is ...

. The by far oldest domesticated figs found anywhere in the world were recovered from an incinerated house at the site, and have been described as coming from cultivated, as opposed to wild, fig trees.

Excavation history

Gilgal I was first excavated by Tamar Noy in 1979. Further excavations were conducted by Ofer Bar-Yosef of

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

, together with Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of

Bar-Ilan University Bar-Ilan University (BIU, he, אוניברסיטת בר-אילן, ''Universitat Bar-Ilan'') is a public research university in the Tel Aviv District city of Ramat Gan, Israel. Established in 1955, Bar Ilan is Israel's second-largest academi ...

Findings

The Early Neolithic village was inhabited for about two centuries before being abandoned some 11,200 years ago. The archaeologists found caches of selectively propagated

fig The fig is the edible fruit of ''Ficus carica'', a species of small tree in the flowering plant family Moraceae. Native to the Mediterranean and western Asia, it has been cultivated since ancient times and is now widely grown throughout the world ...

seeds, stored together with wild

barley Barley (''Hordeum vulgare''), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains, particularly in Eurasia as early as 10,000 years ago. Globally 70% of barley p ...

, wild oat, and

acorn The acorn, or oaknut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives (genera '' Quercus'' and '' Lithocarpus'', in the family Fagaceae). It usually contains one seed (occasionally two seeds), enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and b ...

s in quantities too large to be accounted for even by intensive gathering, at strata datable c. 11,000 years ago. The dig also unearthed the remains of thirteen round buildings made of mud and rock. (Some of the plants tried and then abandoned during the Neolithic period in the

Ancient Near East The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran ( Elam, ...

, at sites like Gilgal I, were later successfully domesticated in other parts of the world.)

Fig tree cultivation

At Gilgal, archaeologists found ancient carbonized figs stored in an 11,400-year-old house which appear to be a mutant "parthenocarpic" variety, adopted and cultivated for human consumption. The figs discovered at Gilgal lack embryonic seeds, a mutation that does not survive in nature more than a single generation. This suggests that the fig trees at Gilgal were artificially maintained by planting live branches in the ground, a horticultural technique known as

vegetative propagation Vegetative reproduction (also known as vegetative propagation, vegetative multiplication or cloning) is any form of asexual reproduction occurring in plants in which a new plant grows from a fragment or cutting of the parent plant or spec ...

. Some fig remains recovered from other sites in the Middle East appear to be of the Gilgal variety. This provides archaeobotanists with proof that agriculture may have started in the Ancient Near East with people domesticating the fig tree about one thousand years before managing to do the same with wheat, barley, and legumes. This pushes back the date of fig tree domestication by some 5,000 years earlier than thought, and makes figs the oldest domesticated crop we know of.

Clay objects

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) denotes the first stage of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, in early Levantine and Anatolian Neolithic culture, dating to years ago, that is, 10,000–8,800 BCE. Archaeological remains are located in the Levantine and ...

(PPNA) baked clay objects were discovered at Gilgal I, most of them figurines and symbolic artifacts. As some of the earliest ceramic findings in the

, they are of interest to archaeologists for their artistic, stylistic, symbolic and technological characteristics.

Education center project

The Moreshet Foundation Israel (MHF Israel) has been working on developing the Gilgal Education Center in the Jordan Valley, a center open to the public that will highlight the importance of this archaeological site.

References

External links

Radiocarbon dates for Gilgal I

University of Cologne, Radiocarbon context database entry for Gilgal I
{{Neolithic Southwest Asia 1979 archaeological discoveries Archaeological sites in the West Bank Neolithic settlements Neolithic Prehistoric sites in the Near East 10th-millennium BC establishments Pre-Pottery Neolithic A