Can a few grape-pollen and olive pits help transform the perceived knowledge people have about the most visited church in Jerusalem? Below the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as busy and as a monument as a living shrine, the digging of the archaeologists has been going on in the lack of breadth where restoration is excavation. It was not only curiosity that caused the trigger. Building issues in the floor and the stability of the Aedicule, the little shrine that holds the traditional tomb, provided a unique opportunity to the scientific world through the ages of footsteps to access the surfaces.
Out of that window botanical remains of uncommon narrative power: the relics of olives and grapes in the earth which used to lie on the open air. The text, found by painstaking excavation beneath the basilica, conforms to a well-known verse in John 19:41, according to which a garden was between the crucifixion and the tomb. The evidence was combined with both text and terrain, as Professor Francesca Romana Stasolla, head of the work, put it: “The archaeobotanical findings have been especially interesting for us, in light of what is mentioned in the Gospel of John” and, she said, “The Gospel mentions a green area between the Calvary and the tomb, and we identified these cultivated fields.”
The tragedy of the discovery is a matter of approach. Archaeobotany considers seeds, pollen and sediments as more architecture of a different nature: delicate, gravelly documents of the way people utilised land, what they put in, and what they planted. Below the floors of Holy Sepulchre, that chronicle indicates planting as opposed to bare rock a commonplace landscape concealed within a site now characterized by stone chapels and ritual choreography. The radiocarbon work still makes the dates get more precise, but the fact that the site has plant residues already enriches the story of the site beyond masonry and monumental memory.
The latter is a story that is encased packed in meters of fill. It had been an Iron Age limestone quarry with different cuts and working marks before it became holy ground. When the extraction became more gradual and the parts were discarded, the terrain changed roles rock faces turned into a boundary; soil was banked and set in place, tombs were hewn at different levels. Stasolla wrote that former change with fieldworker simplicity: “We need to imagine that as the quarry was progressively abandoned, tombs were carved at different levels.” Growing and burying might lie side by side in this stratified environment and be later covered by imperial construction.
The knowledge of what can be known is the engineering decision, old and new. The builders of Constantine in the fourth century were forced to control an uneven surface of the quarry, spiking up and balancing the area, after which the monumentalization of the location into a church began. The current teams have the opposite issue, to safeguard a living structure and retrieve the information that can disappear with a slip of the fingers. Work proceeds in detached areas, so is worship, and record taking becomes as significant as the trench.
Digital tools have turned out to be the wide-angle lens of the project since the church cannot be opened at a go. “While we have not been able to see the entire church excavated in one glance, new technologies are allowing us to reconstruct the bigger picture in our labs.” Site recording also incorporates high-resolution photography to form an orthophoto and a 3D image that enables the researcher to compare what is revealed today with the building construction periods with the past without disrupting the normal life of the building.
Of that balance between prayer and precision the most persistent discovery could be neither seed nor stone, but the continuity of humanity which retained the place of both. That is where Stasolla focuses with his underlining: that long stewardship: “The real treasure we are revealing is the history of the people who made this site what it is by expressing their faith here.” The testimony of the garden, silent as it is, subjects commonplace cultivation to an unusual form of devotion–to give the idea that sacred landscapes are frequently started as a field of labor, and then built up layer after layer.
