The cotton fibers found at Tel Tsef predate the evidence found so far by several hundred years and they probably arrived at Tel Tsef from the Indus Valley region, present-day Pakistan, from a distance of thousands of kilometers
The earliest evidence of the use of cotton fibers in the Ancient Near East, and among the oldest in the world, from about 7000 years ago, was found at Tel Tsef in the Jordan Valley, in an excavation led by Prof. Danny Rosenberg from the School of Archeology and Maritime Cultures and in a study done in collaboration with other researchers from Stanford University, and the State Museum in Hanover.
The cotton fibers found at Tel Tsef predate the evidence found so far by several hundred years and they probably arrived at Tel Tsef from the Indus Valley region, present-day Pakistan, from a distance of thousands of kilometers. "Tel Tsef is a large village from the Chalcolithic period, which flourished during the transition period between the small agricultural societies and the large urban cities of the country. Until today we knew that the inhabitants of the site had trade relations with distant regions such as Egypt, Iraq and Anatolia, and now the circle of trade expands even further to the Indus Valley, where Apparently the cotton was domesticated for the first time. What is interesting about this ancient evidence of a connection with such a remote area is that it is comes from fibers, microscopic parts of ancient threads. We assume that these cotton fibers, found together with wool fibers and plant fibers, arrived at the site as part of fabrics or clothes, that is, from ancient textiles," said Prof. Rosenberg.
Humans probably produced textile products already tens of thousands of years ago, using certain plants such as flax, for the fabric fibers they created. However, since fabrics and many other organic materials tend to break down quickly in conditions other than dry conditions or inorganic conditions, in a significant part of the sites in the Mediterranean climate areas it is rare to find them and the main evidence comes to us from late texts and paintings, or from the tools that were apparently used to produce the fibers and textile products.
Recently, however, researchers have begun to use new methods for locating organic findings, including microscopic and chemical tests that are able not only to locate evidence of plants, but also to identify whether it is a fiber that was woven on purpose and what was the plant from which it was woven. "Part of the issue is that this type of evidence was hardly ever looked for in ancient sites and many times they don't even try to find this type of find," said Prof. Rosenberg. "The main challenge, as in DNA research and organic materials research that we do at Tel Tsaf, is to prevent modern contamination of the sample. In the case of fiber and textile research, the challenge is to neutralize the entry of modern fibers into the sample, since cotton fibers can be found in most clothing items today."
Tel Tsef, which flourished 7,200 years ago in the valley of the springs, not far from Kibbutz Tirat Zvi, was a very large settlement where probably hundreds of people lived. The settlement prospered for about five hundred years, and one of the great mysteries is why the settlement stopped at the site, without any signs of distress or lack of resources, one of the issues the researchers plan to invest in Many efforts in the coming years. "We are still trying to understand," says Prof. Rosenberg, "why in such an important period of time in human history when the small agricultural villages began to expand and grow, the social structure began to be complex - in what would be the basis For the growth of the important state cities of the region and significant technological and culinary developments - such a prosperous site ceased to exist."
The last years of excavation have already revealed evidence of important technological leaps that took place at Tel Tsef and economic ties that its inhabitants had with very distant regions, which were an integral part of the formation of the new socio-economic order, such as the appearance of metal, the production of beer for social and ceremonial consumption, specialization in the creation of uniform stone bricks, hoarding of food on a large scale and more.
That is why the researchers, led by Prof. Li Liu from Stanford University and Prof. Rosenberg from the University, decided that they would try to find the same stealthy evidence of the use and production of textiles. In the pioneering research conducted at the same time at Haifa and Stanford universities, samples taken from fragments of ancient pottery found in residential layers on the site and from the land next to them were examined and the promising results are already being used as a basis for various follow-up studies.
Most of the evidence found in the current study at Tel Tsaf was of flax fibers, but the researchers also found evidence of fibers that were probably made from other plants, including wool, apparently from sheep. "The accepted concept until now is that the local flax was the plant from which textiles were made in the ancient Near East until the appearance of the wool industry thousands of years later. Our new evidence, which shows that some of the fibers were dyed, together with research we have conducted in recent years on tools used to produce textiles such as flech weights, challenge the This concept, which indicates more developed technological capabilities than those we knew," said Prof. Rosenberg.
But an even more surprising find was fibers from cotton, which is not a native plant in the ancient Near East. According to what is known to researchers, today's cotton has four origins, two in South and Central America, one in the Indus Valley, in today's Pakistan, where there is evidence of the use of cotton as early as 6000 years ago, and the last, in Africa, where there is evidence of the use of cotton beginning in the first century BC the count. Ancient DNA studies have shown that cotton was domesticated independently and separately in these areas, and although it is not possible to determine whether the cotton at Tel Tsef represents domesticated plants, according to the researchers, the early dating of Tel Tsef indicates with great probability that the cotton fibers came from the Indus Valley region and not from any source in Africa or America.
The earliest evidence we had so far for cotton fibers in our region was dated to a few hundred years later from the late Chalcolithic period and the Early Bronze Age (approximately 6500-5000 years ago) and it comes from the Dhuweila site in eastern Jordan. Contrary to the precise dating at Tel Tsef, "the finds from Davila do not yet have a precise date and in any case they are later than those we found at Tsef by several hundred years, at the very least, and they join a series of unique finds from Tel Tsef, which testify to its importance as an ancient trading center, alongside being a rich site whose economy was based on "Increased production of agricultural produce in an area that even today is characterized by many water sources and extremely high temperatures, especially in the summer," he adds.
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