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Qumran Archaeology: More Grave Errors |
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The Zinc Coffin According to the report by Eshel et al., the remains of a zinc coffin were discovered in a tomb in the eastern part of the cemetery.[13] Fragments of this alleged zinc coffin were published earlier in BAR under the sensational title “Religious Jews: Save the bones of your ancestors” as lead (sic) and were used to draw attention to justify the need to excavate the cemetery[14] and obtain subsequent funding since it was presumed that the cemetery was in danger of being looted. Had the authors examined published aerial photographs of the site taken by the Jordanian airforce in 1954 and later the Israeli airforce in 1969, which are available to the public and which should have constituted the basis for any mapping process,[15] they would have seen that the tomb in question (978 on their map) had been excavated either by De Vaux (tomb 11) in 1951 or more probably in 1967 by S. Steckoll (Q.8) along with 977 to the south.[16] In fact, both of the “recently looted” tombs had lain open for at least 33 years, if not more.[17] The authors then state that the these two tombs were “excavated illegally,”[18] implying that they were opened by grave robbers; to the contrary, both De Vaux and S. Steckoll had secured governmental permission from the Jordanian Department Antiquities to carry out these excavations in the cemetery. In the summer of 2000, I was shown a fragment of the zinc which then was believed by the excavators to be part of a lead sarcophagus. Immediately I told the excavators that due to its thinness (1 mm) it could not under any circumstances support the weight of an individual: this was not a coffin. The following season (2001) one of the excavators asked me to examine the burial site where the zinc was found after the bottom had been removed by staff members. At the northern end of the locus in the balk were a few cranial fragments which appeared to have been uncovered and left by earlier excavators in the cemetery.[19] An additional uncertainty with their interpretation of the locus is that the zinc lay at a maximum depth of 1.20 meters;[20] none of the north-south tomb excavated by De Vaux is less than 1.5 meters in depth. According to information given on site to a reporter, the burial contained the sheeting from what was now believed to be a wooden coffin, apparently from some important personage. Broshi, while characterizing the coffin’s occupant, remarked to reporters that “the only thing we can be sure of is that he was a very affluent man.” Had their interpretation been credible, there would have been traces of wood along with the human skeletal remains left behind by the looters; neither of which was found in the locus nor in the back dirt from the locus surrounding the tomb. According to the excavators, the looters took “the most valuable item in the tomb, the lid of the coffin, which could have included clues to the occupant.” This is a bit hard to believe: did they take the skeleton and the wood but leave the base behind? Following their report in DSD in which the zinc coffin, which then became a wood coffin covered with zinc, now reverts back to a zinc coffin in the BAR article which appeared sometime later.[21] The zinc report which appears in the appendix[22] shows that the zinc is almost pure zinc. This should have been perfectly clear to the researchers: pure zinc is a relatively recent phenomenon so the “coffin” must be of recent origin.[23] Instead, they provide comparative material from Europe, from the Hellenistic period, to bolster their claim that the person (who was never found) buried in the zinc coffin, which could not support even its own weight, is ancient. Furthermore, according to their footnote 38, “the corrosion of these zinc fragments is consistent with that of other zinc finds from the Roman period.” This may sound impressive to the layperson until one reads further only to find that the three zinc objects cited for comparison are all pre-Roman.[24] In that same footnote, the authors state “the tests showed that the zinc contained traces of lead and iron, (quoting one of the co-directors, Robert Feather), which excludes a modern form of processing zinc and points to the coffin’s antiquity.” Such reporting, particularly when the published zinc analysis shows no lead or iron in the sample, calls into question the value of this information and the credentials of those associated with these statements.[25] On the basis of the archaeological/anthropological and photographic evidence, it should have been clear to all the authors, particularly since two teams had mapped the cemetery that the tomb had been opened since 1967 and not looted recently as BAR and the excavators reported. In short, the evidence shows that the so-called zinc coffin had to have been placed in the empty tomb by someone post 1966-7, the date when it was excavated by Steckoll; thus, its provenance must be questionable. Who planted the object there and the reasons why are a matter of conjecture.
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