LiveScience – Metalworkers who did skilled labor at biblical-era copper mines in modern-day Israel were rewarded for their efforts with well-rounded meals, new research suggests.
The metalworkers’ diet included good cuts of sheep and goat, as well as pistachios, grapes and fish brought to the middle of the desert from the Mediterranean, according to an analysis of ancient leftovers at “Slaves’ Hill,” a mining camp in Israel’s Timna Valley.
The findings imply that “Slaves’ Hill” might be a misnomer; the people who manned the furnaces probably weren’t slaves, but rather, they held a higher status because of their craft, archaeologists say. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]
Not-exactly ‘Slaves’ Hill’
“Somebody took care that these people were eating well,” said Erez Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University.
Since 2012, Ben-Yosef has been leading an archaeological expedition in the heart of Timna Valley, the second biggest source of copper in the southern Levant region. (The biggest is Faynan, farther north in Jordan.) People have taken advantage of the copper deposits at Timna for millennia. There are dozens of smelting sites and thousands of primitive mining pits clearly visible in the region today. And the area is still used for copper production; the Mexican mining giant AHMSA has a stake in the region.
Recently, the Timna Valley team has taken a crack at Slaves’ Hill, a smelting factory on top of a mesa that was in operation during the 10th century B.C., the biblical era of King Solomon. Today, there are traces of ancient furnaces at the site and lots of slag, which is the rocky material that’s left over after metal is extracted from its ore. (Essentially, it’s manmade lava.)
When the famous biblical archaeologist Nelson Glueck explored the region in the 1930s, he named this hilltop site Slaves’ Hill, assuming that its fortification walls were intended to keep enslaved laborers from running off into the desert.
“When he saw this very harsh environment, he assumed that the labor force had to be slaves,” Ben-Yosef told Live Science.
But the findings of the Central Timna Valley Project paint a different picture. Ben-Yosef and his colleague Lidar Sapir-Hen, another archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, looked at animal remains from Slaves’ Hill and found mostly sheep and goat bones, many with butchery marks. This supports the idea that this mining camp relied on livestock for food. Bones from the meatiest parts of the sheep and goats were found near the smelting furnaces.
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