44 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COME.^ MAR
CO/ISRA
EL^ANTIQUITIESAUTH
ORITY(^4
)Lots o’ Motza!
BY BRIDGET ALEXi
Nine thousand years ago — a
couple of millennia after the
first humble farming villages
appeared in the Middle East —
Motza was a town ahead of its
time, a vanguard of urban life. Home to
thousands, the roughly 80-acre site was
about 10 to 100 times larger than other
settlements of the day.
“Mega-huge,” says Hamoudi Khalaily,
who co-led excavations at the site, which
nestles between olive and dun-colored
hills in present-day Israel.
In July, after 16 months of digging, the
Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) team
unveiled Motza’s grandeur. The townwas a dense hub of workshops, public
halls and private homes linked by roads
and alleys. Evidence of art and trade was
everywhere, including bountiful artifacts
such as handcrafted jewelry, Red Sea
shells and Anatolian volcanic glass.
“You get the big full package, the big
full town with all of those luxuries, orga-
nized street systems, et cetera,” says Omry
Barzilai, head of archaeological research
at IAA.
Also found were several hundred
human burials beneath homes through-
out the settlement, similar to other sites
of the period.
The town’s scale surprised even teammembers. Researchers had known some
early farmers inhabited the area since
scattered flint tools, distinctive of the
era, surfaced in the 20th century. But
they didn’t expect much: The region was
thought to be mostly abandoned during
this part of the Neolithic. The IAA only
probed deeper because a highway was
about to be built over Motza.
Preliminary pits in 2015 confirmed
buildings that were about 9,000 years old
just a couple of feet below the surface. But
it wasn’t until late 2018, eight months into
full-scale excavations, that it became clear
“we are dealing with one of the largest
sites in the Middle East,” Khalaily says.