To browse Academia. Gordon, F. Marco Simon ed. This paper discusses the archaeological findings from a rescue excavation in Chartres-Autricum, France, where a group of ritual objects was discovered in a collapsed domestic cellar. The assemblage includes incense-burners, snake-vases, sacrificial knives, and various ceramic and glass vessels, all preserved by debris from a fire.
The findings shed light on the domestic practices and rituals of the time, offering insights into the cultural and historical context of the region.
Dozens of pottery fire pans composed of a bowl-like part and a handle were found in the Philistine repository pit at Yavneh, Israel. They date from the ninth-eighth centuries BCE and are published here for the first time.
These vessels, derived from second-millennium BCE Aegean forms, have never before been identified in the Southern Levant. On the basis of the location of marks of burning, their relation to other finds and the pictorial evidence, we contend that the Yavneh fire pans were used in a cultic context for burning incense.
Their discovery reopens the complex issues of the 'shovel' in the Old Testament and the use of incense in the Iron Age. The present work has the purpose to open some possibilities of interpretation of several artifacts, which, viewed as a whole, can bring new directions of vision in order to reconstruct some cultic or religious activities in the Neolithic period.
