One of the pits of the olive trees, whose grape seeds and pollen caught in centuries of rock have already begun to draw a strange picture in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: not tomb and rock alone, but farmed land.
In the Old City, there is not much area of devotion and rubble piled so closely together in Jerusalem. Within the Holy Sepulchre, a complex of approximately 1.25 acres, which is 112 feet high at its highest point, worship is still going on, with archaeologists excavating in tightly controlled windows under the floor. In 2019, the three communities whose responsibility the church fell under decided to take off battered paving and the practical move provided a unique opportunity to peep over the edge of the site into its previous existence.
One of these findings has had an odd burden due to being at the convergence of text and terrain and the minutest detail that archaeology can preserve. Archaeobotanical analysis of soil samples taken below the paving revealed the remnants of plants used in a working garden – the remains of olive and grapevine. The depth of those samples has been linked to a pre-Christian period of the site, but no radiocarbon dating has been performed so far, with chronology still anchored as to the stratigraphy and context instead of a lab number.
To the readers of the Gospel of John, the botanical evidence comes down with a specific clearness. It tells of a garden which was close at hand where he was crucified and buried: Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden and in the garden a new tomb wherein no man had yet been laid. Francesca Romana Stasolla, the professor in charge of the excavations, put the match between landscape and line in the form of a statement that has reverberated long since the church walls came down: “The archaeobotanical discoveries have been particularly interesting to us, in view of what is said in the Gospel of John,” and, “The Gospel talks of a green space between Calvary and the tomb, and we recognized these cultivated fields.”
The garden is merely a layer in a closely abridged sequence. It started as a hunting field, then as a spot where tombs were hewn out of rock and finally as an area that accreted buildings which made memory architecture. Within the areas of excavation, the previous practical applications of the site have been followed with physical evidence: the uneven surface of the bedrock, the fill material to smooth their surfaces and the remnants of human habitation that accompany people everywhere they go and grieve them after they are gone ceramics, lamps, remains that survive longer than the individuals who constructed them.
This kind of work is gradual since the church is not a museum; it is a working sanctuary. Partitured excavation beneath the floor has been made to allow liturgies and pilgrimages to continue where there is some stillness needed by the ritual calendar. The project has been said to be the largest archaeological dig at the church in almost 200 years, developed more by teamwork than trowels.
Restoration and research are now in a common cause. The project leaders have made frank comments on the uncharacteristic unity which was necessary among the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Latin communities in order to allow the work to proceed at all unity not in principle, but in access, time, and common danger of opening a floor on which the land of the site had been so long the common ground.
Ultimately, perhaps the most powerful finding can be the most obvious one: the establishment of sacred geography as a literal phenomenon. Under a world of incense and hymn the remnants of cultivation, grape, olive, soil, imply that the scene of the story, was at an early time a tended margin, green enough to be remembered, and banal enough to have been forgotten until even the ground itself was called upon to speak.
