Mugharet El- Wad (also spelled Magharet El-Wad or Wady El-Magarah) is a cave on the western side of Mt. Carmel, near the town of Athlit, in present day Israel. Translated into English, Mugharet El-Wad means 'cave of the valley.' It is the largest cave found on Mt. Carmel.
Proof of human occupation at this site has been found dating back approximately 45,000 years. The most significant finds, however, belong to the Natufian Culture of approximately 10,500 to 8,500 years ago (after the retreat of the last glaciation). This was a highly developed culture that made the transition from a Paleolithic to a Neolithic culture and transformed from a hunter-gatherer life-style to one of plant cultivation and animal domestication. The term Natufian was coined by Miss Dorothy Garrod. She was a pre-historian at Cambridge University, who was responsible for a large number of excavations in Palestine from 1928 to 1934, under the direction of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research. Some of the subsequent excavations at this site include a (1980-1981) dig by F. Falla and O. Bar Yosef, and since 1980 by M. Weinstein-Evron.
The findings at this site include more than one hundred individual human burials on the terrace directly in front of the cave. The burials reveal body positions that were tightly flexed, like that of a fetal position. Some were found with ornamentation of bone, stone, or dentalia shell.
Many flint tools were also found at the site, many of these were the lunate, a crescent or arc shaped blade probably used to tip reed arrows (Albright P.59). Other tools found include scrapers for treating animal skins, points for wood and bone working, awls for piercing, stones used as fishing weights, skins and decorative beads (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Also of note were the sickle blades attached to a wooden or bone scythe which would indicate the agricultural inclinations of the Natufians. An ornately carved deer scapula was found to have use-wear markings that wound indicate that it was used in the smoothing and straightening of wooded shafts (Campana P. 237).
Sources:
Mugharet El Wad Cave (Israel). http://www.maxpages.com/ribbentrop/Mugharet_El_Wad_Cave_Israel 14 April 2001
Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. Baltimore, Maryland Penguin Books 1961.
Campana, Douglas V. "A Natufian Shaft-Straightener from Mugharet El Wad, Israel: An Example of Wear Pattern Analysis" Journal of Field Archaeology 6 (1979): 237-242.
Written by: Travis Calvert