A Quantitative Analysis of Jewish Chalk Vessel Frequencies in Early Roman Jerusalem: A View from the City's Garbage Dump

The recent excavations of a section of the first-century CE garbage dump found on the eastern slope of the Lower City of Jerusalem (the City of David/Silwan) have provided an opportunity to conduct the first quantitative analysis of the relative frequencies of the various functional groups and types within a complete assemblage of chalk vessels. As our assemblage derives entirely from random garbage deposited in the Jerusalem city dump, these data may be presumed representative of the quantitative breakdown of vessel types used by Jerusalem's population during the last decades of the Second Temple period. Our study also investigates the ratio of chalk vessels to pottery at our site, an issue of particular interest in light of the manner that contemporary Jewish ritual law related to utensils made of these two kinds of materials.