Mount Carmel Excavations

Between April of 1929 and August of 1934, the American School of Prehistoric Research partnered with the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem to fund seven seasons of excavation at the caves of Nahal Me’arot in modern-day Israel. The archaeological significance of this area was realized in 1928, when the cliffs were threatened by British quarrying activities on the coast near Haifa, Israel (Weinstein-Evron et al., 2007, 40). On behalf of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine, Charles Lambert dug some trenches in the area and discovered, among other findings, an ancient carving in bone and two human burials. The ASPR and the British School of Archaeology began their excavations one year later, led by Dorothy Garrod.

The excavations focused on three caves: Mugharet el-Wad, Mugharet et-Tabun, and Mugharet es-Sukhul. Mugharet el-Wad was the largest of the three caves by area, and the team excavated it for 5 seasons between 1929 and 1933 (Garrod and Bate, 1937, 6). Inside it, they found archaeological contexts that ranged in age from Bronze to Upper Levalloiso-Mousterian. The cave contained a plethora of human remains (at the time they were estimated to have belonged to at least 62 individuals, although recent re-analyses have increased this figure to nearly 100 (Weinstein-Evron et al., 2007, 41). In one of the layers, labeled B2 by Garrod, she found bone, shell, weapons, and ornaments, that combined give “the most complete picture we poses of any Stone Age culture of the region before the Neolithic of Jericho” (Garrod, 1957, 213). Subsequent studies (Weinstein-Evron et al., 2013, 91) have further divided B2 into three layers, and the oldest layer in the cave is of Natufian origin and dates back to about 12,950 years ago (Weinstein-Evron et al, 2013, 91).

Mugharet es-Sukhul (also referred to as “Cave of the Kids” in early publications) was excavated in 1931 and 1932, and in it they found a wide temporal range of human remains that have since been dated to 80,000 to 140,000 years ago (Tryon, 2020, 6). The most well-known of these is likely Skhul V, which was found with a wild boar mandible on its chest and was uncovered by Theodore McCown in the spring of 1932 when Garrod was unable to join the expedition. Overall, the team found up to 10 early Homo sapien burials, and three of these ten specimens had been children. The third cave, Mugharet et-Tabun, was investigated in 1929, and then again between 1931 and 1934. Of the three saves, it is the only one that represents all three (early, middle, and late) time periods of the Middle Pleistocene. Among the findings was a Neanderthal dated to 112-143,000 years ago, and there are lithics from the cave that are thought to date back to 200,000 years ago (Akazawa et al., 1998, 45). Overall, these early excavations by the American School of Prehistoric Research and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem paved the way for the many studies that were to follow, and they played a critical role in the establishment of a chronology of prehistory in the Near East.