Photo Credit: Flash90
Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar showing an ancient medallion dated to the late Byzantine period (early seventh century CE) with a shofar (ram s horn) and a Torah scroll ornament, September 9, 2013. The treasure was discovered in recent Jerusalem excavations near the Temple Mount southern wall, by members of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology.
Dr. Eilat Mazar, a pioneering archaeology professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalemâs Institute of Archaeology, passed away on Monday. She was 64.
Mazar was a third-generation Israeli archaeologist who participated in digs from a young age, as the granddaughter of Professor Benjamin Mazar who excavated the Land of Israel during the British Mandate period.
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Feb. 4, 2021
About 120,000 years ago, in what is today Israel, somebody devoted great effort to etching six parallel lines on the bone of an aurochs. This discovery in the open-air Middle Paleolithic site of Nesher Ramla in Israel is the oldest evidence of deliberate decoration in the Levant.
The bone and the few similar objects found to date support the theory that both early modern humans and the hominins predating them were capable of behavior associated with symbolism, suggests the team led by Marion Prévost of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology, with Yossi Zaidner, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski and Kathryn Crater Gershtein of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, and José-Miguel Tejero of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique de France. The study was published this week in Quaternary International.