El misterioso poblado de la Edad de Piedra | DW Documental

A Mysterious child's grave was found in the middle of a rocky landscape in Jordan. The 9,000-year-old tomb belongs to a girl who was buried under the floor of a house in a Stone Age settlement with her there was a valuable and elaborate treasure funeral probably a sign of the great loss and esteem when they became sedentary, they began to take the dead to the house to have them close to them just like the ancestors. The archaeologists who discovered the remains of the 8-year-old girl affectionately called her Yamila the Beautiful. What is her story that this tomb tells us about life in the Neolithic settlement of iba on June 26, 2018 the excavations are coming to an end for that year the archaeologists extract their latest finds everything seems normal but Then the team comes across the tomb of yamila that immediately catches their attention everyone holds their breath because the construction of the tomb was extremely elaborate and yamila's funerary trousseau exceeds all expectations this necklace is exceptional in every way a truly sensational ornament gives you goosebumps it might even Comparing it with the enclave of Petra is fantastic.

The treasure arrives in Germany to be studied. The restorers Andrea Ficha and Alice Burgertt prepare the accounts so that the archaeologist Jalarashi can reconstruct this wonderful piece of jewelry after returning it to Jordan. But then a virus paralyzes our modern world, life stops and national borders are closed. At the end of 2021, the scientific staff of the former East Research Center of the Free University of Berlin can return to Jordan in their luggage, they carry Camila's restored necklace in the new museum of Petra not far from Falla This work of art from the Stone Age will occupy a special place.

The archaeological finds can only leave Jordan to be examined. They are basically the property of the country, but before the restorers assemble the necklace for the exhibition, they head off. Together with the team of archaeologists, he discovered the site in 1984. Since then, he has directed the excavations. Hallid RAE of Seattle is from La Tribuna to Marin. Some of them and their families have been helping in the excavation work for decades. neighboring city of Petra, when tourism grew in importance, the government relocated them to the new town of Albaida. The base camp of the excavation team is located here.

The necessary equipment is kept in a humbly furnished house, they only take the essentials since the road to fence this the most rugged is an austere rocky landscape through which the trucks reach the entrance of the deep gorge of wow the little vegetation on the road only thrives with artificial irrigation however these large trees grew without human intervention reveal the beginning of a gorge formed by bodies of water sic in Arabic. From here you can only continue on foot carrying the canyoning equipment in extreme conditions. Even by joining forces you cannot carry everything on the first Ascent and yet the sic is the easiest access to This hidden site we can assume that nine thousand years ago people chose the same path, so it is not surprising that the first reference to Go came from a climber more than 30 years ago, an Austrian woman accidentally found Stone Age tools in the feet of one of these walls Hans girl found out, he undertook an adventurous search And he was lucky at that time Gebel climbed the gorge without any help today three of the stairs that lead will remain in the gorge during the excavation the rest are needed at the site the location hidden part of this Stone Age town protected its relics from grave robbers and also from later construction.

At the top the six widens to reveal the plateau that archaeologists call go just like the surrounding region marion Benz and Hans girl return to a A familiar place, however, for Andrea and Alice it is the first time in this mysterious village, the place where Chamila and the accounts with which the two restaurateurs worked for almost two years were discovered, except for the vocational visit of some goat herders, this place remained. intact for thousands of years the nine thousand year old village was the first layer that appeared in the excavations archaeologists have to work with those materials that can be preserved for thousands of years stone horn bones conch shells based on scientific results and their imagination Jordanian archaeologist and art historian Serín Alchuvaki brings life to the village Al Shobaki was part of the excavation team in 2018 and since then she feels a strong connection with the site Marion Benz is in Valle for the fifth time she and Jala Larachi were the ones They brought Yamila's tomb to light.

The sensational discovery of 2018. For me, it was like winning the lottery. I was able to excavate many tombs that revealed a lot to me about their social structure and that is exactly my specialty. The transition from nomadism to sedentary lifestyle and the social changes that occurred. They occurred in one of the oldest towns in the world discovered so far. This transition took place about nine thousand years ago along with Jericho to Inhassell Basta and other sites. It is part of the great archaeological sites located along the Rift Valley of the Jordan about 8,000 years before Christ, settlements arose here that expanded until they reached 16 hectares and then they disappeared again.

It is halfway between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea on the edge of the Arabá Valley for geologists and hydrologists. The Dead Sea is an ideal climate archive. The climatic conditions of the past can be read in its sedimentary layers. About 12,000 years ago, a warm period began. The glaciers melted. And the sea level rose. Climate change sought to send us cool, humid and hot summer months. a favorable climate for cereals and legumes This change and the fertile soil allowed sedentary lifestyles the towns grew more and more the inhabitants practiced agriculture and dedicated their free time to beautiful things the landscape between Amania ends probably resembled the north of the current Jordan where reforestation is beginning to give results it is still not clear how the inhabitants of go got water there is no evidence of a spring they used the sic as a water reservoir what this isolated plateau looked like life has changed a lot since then today we have temperatures extremely high, at that time there must have been a water resource here, as indicated by the tools that were used to crush seeds, so there had to be vegetation and a green landscape here.

The basis of the subsistence of the inhabitants of Va was agriculture and livestock. especially legumes since we have evidence of the existence of peas and also sheep and goats as a source of animal protein, we assume that the pastures extended from here towards the Arabá valley and especially towards the east to the foothills of the Nellet plateau where The great steppes of that time began and today there is a desert. The population grew rapidly due to the abundant consumption of carbohydrates compared to their previous life as hunters and gatherers. Women could have children no longer every four or five years but every two.

But then Why did some humans settle in such a limited space? The land for agriculture must also have been scarce and the water supply, like today, would be a challenge. I think their isolation was an advantage. A group up here, this territory was probably not disputed so that the people who occupied this place would have territorial problems among themselves but not with others the scarcity of space motivated the high density of the constructions layer by layer the workers penetrate into the past the walls are up to 4 meters deep this indicates that the houses had at least two floors the rooms were tiny with little or no natural light the findings show that they were used mainly to prepare and store food so far no evidence of paths or alleys has been found between the houses we can say without a doubt that The settlement was very populated since walls appeared everywhere where we have excavated, but what is also evident is that the rooms, especially the small ones in the first phases, were too small to live in, so we assume that they lived on the roofs in the open air.

Unlike during the time of hunters and gatherers in which a few people were spread over vast regions, hundreds now lived together in a relatively small space. For Marion Benz, this situation raises above all social questions. People lived here in adjoining houses for at least 500 years. Apparently, without major conflicts, one did not live 500 meters or a kilometer from one's neighbors but rather right next to it, wall to wall. This represents an enormous social challenge. Japan, we do not know how they were organized, what their rules of coexistence were or how the families they lived in were composed. or they made use of the houses.

The doctor Julia Gresky from the German archaeological institute examines the bones found to find clues about relationships, age and causes of death. Unfortunately, the bones are not very well preserved, they are very brittle when you clean them with the brush, you can see them. pretty good but when you take it out they break and we have to glue them together in the laboratory So they don't carry as much information as other better preserved skeletons however a well trained eye can recognize some things at first glance This is the skull of a child looking towards me it is sunken in the ground unfortunately partly under the wall So here there are at least two individuals, an adult and a child, perhaps several children.

So they did not bury the dead far from the villages but in the middle of them under the floor of the interior rooms I think that our current funeral customs would have seemed as strange to them as theirs did to us. We try to keep death as far away as possible. Our cemeteries are outside our homes, if possible somewhere well away and We try to have as little contact as possible with death. Perhaps that was totally disrespectful by the standards of the time and the complete opposite of what they did. Yamila was also buried under the floor of a house, remaining close to the living.

The upper layer was like a floor painted white with a face underneath. had engraved and then deliberately broken slabs of White sandstone that, freshly cut, shine in the sun like mother-of-pearl. Below we found a large tombstone that caused us great emotion when we lifted it. We removed it and underneath there was only Santos sand, so we had to brush a lot, the team was afraid. It was an empty tomb and I was about to cover it again, then the first beads appeared. First we numbered them one by one, then we numbered them in groups and finally we ended up taking photos and small sketches, taking out entire packages of beads until we reached 2,500 2,500 beads Never have so many pieces been found here Where did they come from And what did they represent At the beginning of 2019 the valuable pieces were taken to Stuttgart to be analyzed at the Academy of Fine Arts specialized in the conservation of ancient cultural heritage there Alice assumed responsibility for the restoration of the individual pieces while the archaeologist Jala Alarashi took care of the reconstruction of the necklace as a whole from the marks made during its production and its use Alarashi She was able to draw conclusions about the meaning of each bead in a small back room on the third floor The treasure is jealously guarded, which probably no one knows better than Alice Borjard.

At first, when they were in the bags, it was impossible to see the state of the accounts. The objective also on the part of the archaeologists was that in the end there would be an exhibit, but first we had to evaluate If this was possible taking into account the state of the beads and how many could be exposed, each of the beads passes through the hands of Alice Burger who carefully scrapes and identifies the sediments and the interested layers under the microscope and if necessary submits The fragile treasure undergoes different treatments. The restorer preserves the beads in special resin solutions to be able to use them in the final work in the most similar way possible to the original.

This treatment can be removed in case future generations of scientists discover new possibilities. Surprisingly, the restoration techniques make it possible for Jala al Arashi to have about 80% of these 9,000-year-old beads. First, we tried to understand the position of the beads without understanding them as parts of a necklace, a belt, or another object. We just wanted to understand the relationship. Among the bones and beads as we found them during the excavation, a large part of the beads were in the area of ​​​​the girl's neck. After examining the archaeological data, we focused only on the beads and in their original position, a finding helped greatly.

As far as understanding the jewel is in a way the central piece, one of the first objects we found was the ring because it was in a vertical position in the tomb. First we dug the edge, it was very fragile and we had to be careful. After about three days we managed to extract it. the whole ring but it was fragmented we discovered small beads that were still embedded in those perforations So from the beginning we knew that the ring played a very important role for thenecklaceSo the mother-of-pearl ring provided valuable information about the conception of the necklace, it was the point of union of the cords.

It was also evident that it had been carved in a single piece from a large shell to understand the ability that people had to At that time, Wolf tries to reconstruct the mother-of-pearl ring as faithfully as possible, although it is not a scientific experiment. It helps to understand what tools were used 9,000 years ago. Since today, talking about the bead necklace, as an archaeotechnician, I am tempted to reconstruct that discovery naturally with the original technique of the Stone Age for that I first had to get a large mother-of-pearl shell the contours of the mother-of-pearl ring are drawn on the shell with a burin obtained by an accurate blow to a silence blade;

If the edge of the burin came out well, this front edge is the part that we will use to work, probably this is how the mother-of-pearl ring was carved in one piece. You also have to be careful when drilling, you have to turn a lot and apply little pressure because otherwise they can break. The Drill Bit or the shell, while the shell was something exotic, the inhabitants of Goa probably found the raw material for the small red sandstone beads without going too far. They were probably made with a method already known from other sites that I have already tried several times as well.

It requires a lot of patience and care and one in five beads breaks during the process. These small pieces of stone are sanded to flatten them. Polishing the side edges gives the pieces the desired roundness. A very delicate step follows. Wolfheim carefully drills them. the center of the bead with a flint drill bit already has the hole now we can finish sanding the beads one by one Although there is another possibility for this we insert several drilled stones on a stick and now we sand this entire row of stones on the sandstone slab together while he said, I'm turning the stick and so all the beads will be the same size, as you can see, it goes quite quickly, the edges and the large edges have already disappeared.

And if I continue sanding for half an hour or an hour, all the beads will be more or less the same size. Those The beads were incredibly delicate and small, they had to be very skilled people with a very delicate touch to make something so fragile. The necklace demonstrates the extraordinary artisanal skill of the first sedentary humans and their sense of aesthetics, something that does not match the generalized stereotype of the primitive humans of the Stone Age the team named the girl's remains after this jewel yamila the beautiful this girl must have been so important that they took this elaborate masterpiece and buried it in the ground After so much work so this find has many dimensions that We are just beginning to understand each element of the necklace tells several stories that of the raw material the elaboration its relationship with the final work and something about the deceased girl Yamila will go down in history for refuting the image that was often had of the Neolithic Stone Age It is presented as simple and straightforward, but if you look at these jewels and the construction of these tombs, you have to assume that there were real specialists and extensive exchange networks.

The turquoise on her necklace were from Sinai, the shells from the Red Sea and therefore how it is threaded, one must assume that it was something very special. The amount of time that people devoted to luxury craftsmanship at that time is demonstrated not only by the filigree pendants found in other fence tombs but also by the mass production of delicate rings made with the red sandstone of fencing, the remains found by the excavation team show that they were made in almost all houses. The famous fence sandstone rings were made with more or less round discs in which a hole was made.

They made a slot here to then extract the central part, a process that is also demonstrated by the expert in arching technique. After removing the inner disc, there are two ways to continue processing a ring like this: either we give it the desired shape with our burin or we sand them until we reach the size sought the sanding was the sound that could be heard from afar when one approached a Neolithic settlement the fragile Rings are a mystery even today we do not know exactly how they were used we believe that they were something purely collectible The more rings someone had the greater their prestige wrong, my theory is that they were a kind of coupon for social exchange used to express esteem and reinforce the social bond.

It is interesting the fact that there were pirated copies already at that time, these sandstone rings of such a characteristic red were also made as a brand. calcium up in much easier to manipulate and faster and then they were red So they were made outside the sandstone region since human beings began to produce objects pirated copies that demand for special goods and the extensive commercial relationships also carried risks the existence of the town was increasingly dependent on the supply of raw materials and markets the exotic materials for the yamila necklace are just one example of the demand for luxury items whose barter demanded something in return another challenge for this settlement was to achieve peaceful coexistence in a small space since until now no evidence of a hierarchical structure has been found.

Modern comparative studies have confirmed that starting with 150 people it does make it extremely difficult to control that there are no conflicts in the group, that is, that conflicts must be managed, up to 500 people lived in a huge settlement for the Neolithic period. Social conflicts can escalate quickly in such a precarious situation. Without a doubt, many factors coincided for the inhabitants to abandon their settlement around the year 6,900 BC. It is difficult to say whether this evolution was a collapse or simply a change. It is probably that its last settlers presented greater differences among themselves, some returned to nomadism while others continued with a sedentary life in smaller villages and perhaps this was the best, most lasting and socially acceptable thanks to its remote location in fence many things have been preserved for posterity yamila's tomb and her necklace the most important find of the excavation so far will now occupy a special place in the new petra museum in the Museum is presented the entire history of the country Starting with wow, it is also at the beginning of a development that changed human life in a much more radical way than the industrialization of the 19th century or current digitalization.

Cultures came and went, their individuals abandoned settlements and moved to others but they would no longer return to an existence as hunters and gatherers Yamila's tomb tells all that and much more hence the importance for José that the construction is as perfect as possible and each stone occupies its rightful place my task is to rebuild the tomb in the Museum And that's what I'm doing it looks good not in another room of the museum the big moment arrives for the restorers Andrea ficha and Alice burgertt and the bead specialist so that the 9000 year old Jewel survived the trip Unharmed, she was transported unarmed from Germany to Jordan.

Now the strings of beads will be transformed again into the necklace that the grieving parents placed around the neck of their deceased daughter nine thousand years ago. Jalarashi drew a pattern that serves as a template. They really thought a lot about the design. of the necklace it was not only about the selection and arrangement of the beads but also the exact length of each of the cords. So probably not only people who made beads participated but also others specialized in the manufacture of cords. first forms of distribution of work as a partial specialization but how they obtained the appropriate materials remains a mystery to work with exotic materials it is better to live in a well-located town where you can create a network of relationships to access quality raw materials however this The town was almost hidden in the mountains if you take into account the surroundings and the location of the town, it is something very strange.

The inhabitants of Va were well connected despite their remote location. It is impossible to say how close their contact was with the neighboring villages, but despite of all the adversities they knew what was happening in other places while in the valley they work on Yamila's necklace in wow the excavations continue Marion has discovered a tombstone in room number 28 the sensations of déjà Vu since the excavation season is about to begin again finish however Hansbel has his doubts now that everything is clear the situation seems very different to me there is a possibility that it is just a slab on the ground and not a grave I don't know the plaster and the layer of ash suggest that it is a grave but no I can be totally sure I would clean it first and then do a test with the spatula I would lift it up a little and see if there is a hole underneath 90% of the time there is a grave with many bones yes you are optimistic here it sounds different than you hear it there Maybe one side covers a hollow part and the other is not true, here it already arrived from the bottom, yes, it takes it out horizontally because we don't know what the crack is like.

Now it broke, be more careful, a puzzle with many pieces. Well, a 3D puzzle, for that we have here a the restorers have erected the tombstone again, the emotion begins again, they must work meticulously, although time is of the essence, cleaning the area carefully. Finally, and interrupting the work, night has fallen, it has a special charm, despite all the adversities, it is a fascinating place that invites you to stay with the discovery of yamila and her necklace the team of archaeologists reaped their reward after so much fatigue and years of work the next day the climax of this trip is about to arrive for jala alarachi Andrea and Alex burgertt the three have assembled Yamila's necklace that will now be installed in its New Home we have finally found a nice place just like we imagined it now not only exists on paper but in reality in the Museum it is fantastic wow the last day of the excavation has begun I have The plaster has been removed but there is only sand underneath.

What a pity. Not in room number 28, they did not find anything under the large slab, but in room number 17, the forensic expert Julia Gresky had discovered the skull of a child, which in the meantime she already managed to remove. Now, I have discovered something. more than that he will also try to recover it as intact as possible Although time is short look what I found Yes tell me what you have where the child's skull was I have found the cervical spine the ribs an arm in its correct position and a beautiful necklace of beads around the neck a bead necklace you say Yes with some small pieces of clay and a beautiful red and green stone you are fantastic and all over again at the last moment that jala comes the situation is reminiscent of 2018 back then jala alarachi had to stop what he was doing to rescue the sensational chain of yamila and now in 2021 the same thing the discoverer Julia gresky has to take her jalalaran flight if she is in charge of recovering the accounts as if the graves are leaving they told the team to come back next year there is still a lot here more to discover jala larashi collected and labeled the beads for now he will stay in albaida examining these new treasures up close piece by piece that will tell us about life 9000 years ago in recent decades will help us see Neolithic humans with different eyes They could invest time in aesthetic matters, jewelry and equipment because their food was assured, which made sensational discoveries possible but at the same time it would not fail to pose new enigmas to the world.