What will a few carbon-dark grains of seed in a stone floor tell us of a place to which millions of people have paid a tribute of reverence?
The sensory world is right there in Jerusalem, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where perfumes stick to the air, the feet tread the narrow aisles, and the service is going on as it has always gone on. Below that living rhythm, however, archeologists have been tracking a less noisy record–one in the stratification of soil, in pollen grains and in debris of commonplace existence which accreted many centuries before the domes of the church had enclosed the area.
The excavations at the time developed through practical needy. An extended project of replacing and stabilising parts of the flooring of the basilica has provided unprecedented access to strata beneath the floor, and the work has been planned to ensure that the church is still open and in use as a place of prayer. With the floor being opened in different locations, the team has come to find out that the ground has been changed in terms of roles many times throughout its history: firstly as an Iron Age limestone hunting ground, then as a field, and finally as a burial terrain. Prof. The excavation has been directed by Francesca Romana Stasolla, who characterized the approach as incomplete and focused, that is, digging up one fragment at a time, and laboratories reconstructed the missing parts of the bigger picture.
That bigger picture now extends to botanical traces that would be in line with cultivation. Based on soil samples under the floor, archaeobotanical analysis of pollen and other samples found archaeologically revealed the presence of olive trees and grapevines. The archaeological context dates the concerned layers to the pre-Christian era, whereas the radiocarbon dating is yet to be done. To those who read the Gospel of John the echo is instantaneous: “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid”. Stasolla has written, “The archaeobotanical findings have been especially interesting for us, in light of what is mentioned in the Gospel of John, whose information is considered written or collected by someone familiar with Jerusalem at the time.”
Archaeobotany is particularly convincing at this point since it reconstructs what cannot be rebuilt with stone. Seeds and pollen do not proclaim themselves in such columns or chiseled lintels; they are preserved as remnants of shadow, nourishment, and work. Here the remains of plants lie side by side with other signs of normal life -pottery, lamps and animal bones, and the suggestion is of a landscape in which people cultivated the soil and traversed it, not of an empty and virgin emptiness awaiting divine intervention. The evidence of the garden also contributes to an earlier geographical riddle: tombs were placed beyond the walls of a city, and the region of the Holy Sepulchre was not necessarily within the borders of Jerusalem at all.
It is as full of stratifications as is the soil that makes up the site. The disproportionate strokes on the quarry were made into surfaces to be smoothed off; the burial-place was turned into an object of worship; and in the fourth century the building projects of the emperors cast a monument on what had been rock and earth. As Stasolla puts it, we must reason that, as the prey was increasingly deserted, tombs were hewn at varying depths.
All those changes produce the most durable artifact as human attention. The true treasure we are letting out is the history of the people who made this place what it is by expressing their faith here, Stasolla said. Under the floor, the traces of a garden now exist as little, experimentable indications of a more ancient Jerusalem–a Jerusalem in which the cultivation, burial, memory, and worship were moving on the same soil, one above the other, in succession.
