Talk:Tel Motza

Can this Temple be described as being built on a Mountain or Hill?
And if so would it be the Summit of the Mount or just on the Slopes of it?--JaredMithrandir (talk) 03:36, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Neolithic phase: age, exact location (is it the "tell"?)
"Archaeologists found at Tel Motza remains of a settlement dated to the Neolithic period (about 6000 BCE)". Based on a Haaretz 2012 article.

6+2=8000 yrs old, which seems to contradicts the academic paper cited first, Paléorient (2007), which is quoted to say "9,000-year-old".

AGE:
 * Maybe Haaretz (2012) has more recent data than the 2007 Paléorient article?
 * Or the journalist used a general chronology, equating Neolithic to "about 6000 BCE"?
 * Or the tell is another part of the site than the one described in the Paléorient (2007) article? Which leads to the next question.

LOCATION: Where is the Neolithic settlement located vs. the tell:
 * On the tell, or maybe on the tell and the surrounding area (one formulation seems to suggest just that)?
 * Or separately from the tell, which might just consist of more recent layers (Iron Age etc.)?

Without a site plan (cf. En Esur), description, or even photos, this leaves the user very confused. Very large, very old, and... that's it. Arminden (talk) 11:04, 30 March 2022 (UTC)


 * 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. Zerotalk 12:06, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
 * 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. Zerotalk 13:31, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. 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)


 * I feel a map coming on. Zerotalk 23:48, 30 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Neolithic findings on the tell too. I have "first on the tell and then in the basin" in a new recent source. Zerotalk 01:38, 31 March 2022 (UTC)


 * I like your feelings :))
 * 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)

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
 * Emmaus of the New Testament, see Carsten Peter Thiede's work. This is mentioned at Motza and Emmaus.

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)


 * 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? Zerotalk 14:06, 3 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I won't be home for another ten days or longer, I just wanted to pass on whatever I knew or thought about it.
 * That last sentence sounds like a good joke from Absurdistan. I enjoyed it too much to try and look for an answer. Arminden (talk) 17:50, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Map


I overlaid multiple source maps (about 10!) and came up with this summary. Zerotalk 11:56, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

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. Zerotalk 02:31, 6 April 2022 (UTC)


 * 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)
 * All other things being equal, I agree that "Motza" would be the better title. But we already have Motza on the modern settlement, so I think Tel Motza is the most natural way to disambiguate. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 16:07, 12 April 2022 (UTC)