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Text and/or other creative content from
this version of
Motza was copied or moved into
Tel Motza with
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Can this Temple be described as being built on a Mountain or Hill?
The location of neolithic site given in
this paper is about 150m south-west of the temple site shown on the map at the end of
this page. I believe I can see the excavations in an aerial photo. The new-ish Highway 1 overpass runs between them.
Zerotalk12:06, 30 March 2022 (UTC)reply
To editor
Arminden: Now I have a 2020 book on excavations at Motza and it seems that excavations with neolithic finds covered a substantial area abutting the south edge of Tel Motza. A summary: "The excavations confirmed previous assumptions that the large area south of Tel Motza and the old highway was an organic part of the Neolithic settlement previously revealed to the north of the highway, which expanded southward during the final phase of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, reaching as far as Naḥal Soreq. Another important conclusion of this excavation relates to the settlement dimensions during the final period of expansion, estimated by the excavators to have reached approximately 30 hectares, thus making the FPPNB site of Motza one of the largest in the Levant." The "old highway" is a section of the Tel-Aviv–Jerusalem road that was bypassed to remove a sharp curve.
Zerotalk13:31, 30 March 2022 (UTC)reply
Thank you
Zero0000. I am back doing more intense RW work, so if I post a question, it's because I don't have the time to do the research by & for myself, but mainly to ask others to work on it for the article's sake. So thanks for giving me this valuable information, it does help me, but I won't be able to edit the article for the forseeable future.
So, if I got it right (and that's what I thought would be the answer), the Neolithic mega-settlement covered a large area, creating a layer which either touched on, or can also be dug out at the base of, the tell, but the tell is mainly Iron Age, possibly with more strata on top of that. There's nothing in the article about whether the temple was free-standing (seems so) or part of a wider settlement (possibly not tested because they only undertook a ltd salvage dig).
Arminden (
talk)
15:34, 30 March 2022 (UTC)reply
3,000 Neolithic inhabitants... I so wished I could have an image of how it looked like, how they got along. Apparently a tribe = 30 to 150 people, because that's what we're conditioned by millennia of evolution to share living space with without using too much violence. Huge leap forward.
Arminden (
talk)
16:57, 31 March 2022 (UTC)reply
Zero0000 Check out the Finkelstein & Gadot paper below. There's a Tel Moza = Khirbet Mizzah = the ruins of the village of
Qaluniya, and a different Kh. Beit Mizza nearby, now dealt with at
Mevaseret Zion (a discarded previous candidate for biblical Mo(t)za). So the missing redirects, or the fancy ones used so far in various articles, can be restricted along these lines. Finkelstein & Gadot seem to be focusing only on the Iron Age site.
I am pretty sure that the article must be renamed. The tell represents maybe the core, or probably the entirety of, the Iron Age site (Finkelstein & Gadot: "The modern name—Tel Moza—stems from biblical Mozah"), but the much larger Neolithic settlement (30 ha or thereabout) is seemingly not covered by the name. The built-up village of Qaluniya was probably also smaller, and keeping a separate page for a site inhabited in periods so remote in time and with major significance for several of them makes perfect sense. "Ancient Motza" could be a name covering whatever else there is there. Milevski & Vardi (2020) are also using a more general term, see "The Mega Project at Motza (Moẓa)". There are or might be several periods of maximum interest:
Neolithic mega-site
Iron Age - biblical significance
Second Temple period, when the "willow" (actually poplar) branches from there were used at the Temple altar, see
Motza
But the different actual archaeological sites must be clearly identified, the fact that at some point this or that settlement possibly covered one, two, three... however many of the various, stratigraphically distinct settlement cores (excavation sites) does not justify lumping them together. Most obvious argument: the Neolithic site was probably the largest, but that has no bearing on the later periods, from biblical Motza to Arab Palestinian Qaluniya.
Arminden (
talk)
17:54, 2 April 2022 (UTC)reply
Arminden All of these places were very close together, overlapping even. Wait until I whip up a map, sometime in the next week. One funny thing is that modern Motza was not here until the 1960s or later. It was over to the west where Motza Illit is now. When a village moves, does its archaeological history move too?
Zerotalk14:06, 3 April 2022 (UTC)reply
Zero0000 I won't be home for another ten days or longer, I just wanted to pass on whatever I knew or thought about it.
I think that Tel Motza is a fair article name for both the Iron Age and neolithic finds. One of the excavations in the middle of the "Iron Age" area found stuff from multiple periods starting in the neolithic.
Zerotalk02:31, 6 April 2022 (UTC)reply
Great map!
About the name: fact is, the archaeologists don't use "Tel Motza" for what's beyond the tell. Hectares of Neolithic remains vs. a concentrated, raised (accumulation of strata), settlement mound (= tell).
Arminden (
talk)
13:12, 12 April 2022 (UTC)reply