Shipwreck or Sunken Votives? The Shavei Zion Assemblage Revisited

Abstract

The site of Shavei Zion is an enigmatic deposit of hundreds of figurines and ceramic vessels found on the sunken kurkar ridge off the coast of the western Galilee. Despite its importance to the understanding of both maritime activities and cultic practices, the site has never been fully published. Only a part of the figurine assemblage has been analysed in the past, and the associated ceramic evidence has only been presented in limited preliminary reports. This article presents for the first time the evaluation of the entire ceramic assemblage extracted from the Shavei Zion underwater site, as part of a comprehensive publication project.

Battles beneath the Sea: Phoenician Votive Offerings as a Possible Religious Response to Extreme Marine Events in the Gulf of Cadiz

“…The underwater discovery of the figurines in Sancti Petri and the Barra de Huelva should be assessed in the context of recent research on underwater archaeological assemblages of Phoenician provenance. On one hand, there is the case of the Shavei Zion assemblage, a deposit of hundreds of figurines and ceramic vessels found off the coast of western Galilee, traditionally regarded as the remains of the cargo of a shipwreck but considered to be votive offerings by recent commentators (Artzy and Sheizaf 2019 ; Edrey 2019: 163-64), which were deposited over a long period of time in a very specific place off the Levantine coast in a ritual of unknown meaning (Edrey, Erlich, and Yasur-Landau 2020).…”