Raqefet stone mortars

Three forms at one cave

The name refers to three studied features at Raqefet Cave, not to one standard vessel. BM1 and BM2 are deep, narrow mortars hollowed into boulders; BM3 is a bowl-like hollow cut into the cave floor. The 2018 study describes BM1's cylindrical shaft as about 33 cm deep, with a hole at its base. BM2 has a funnel-shaped shaft about 35 cm deep. BM3 is a bedrock mortar about 18 cm deep and 27 cm across the rim. These measurements describe the cited examples, not a general size for Natufian mortars.

Their settings differ. The 2018 authors report that BM1 was removed after the 2006 excavation and is held by the University of Haifa's ground-stone research laboratory; BM2 remains in Raqefet Cave. BM3 belongs to a cluster of hollows in the cave floor. A movable boulder mortar and a fixed bedrock hollow should not be treated as the same construction.

What the excavation shows

The 2006 excavation report describes two boulder mortars in Locus 2. Its excavation descriptions and photographs show a boulder mortar set into a deep cut or pit, supported by small stones and surrounded by backfill; only its upper portion remained exposed, near the cave-floor level. This records an excavated placement. It does not establish that every Raqefet mortar was buried this way, or that burial itself was a brewing feature.

In a cutaway, soil and stone supports belong around the documented boulder mortar, while the working hollow is within the boulder. BM3 is instead carved into bedrock and has no separate vessel beneath the floor. These are site observations, not a construction plan for a reproducible home mortar.

A debated brewing interpretation

Liu and colleagues combined archaeological context, wear traces, plant residues and experimental comparisons to argue that the boulder mortars stored plant foods, including malted cereals, and that the bedrock mortar was used to pound and cook plants in a proposed beer-making sequence. This is a reconstruction from several lines of evidence, not a surviving recipe or direct record of fermentation.

David Eitam's 2019 commentary challenged whether the evidence supports beer-making and offered cereal-food processing as an alternative explanation. Liu and colleagues answered in a published response and defended their interpretation. The disagreement means this page presents brewing as a proposal, not a settled identification. No complete recipe or verified fermentation procedure follows from the mortar evidence alone.

Use and acquisition

For these named objects, the relevant use is archaeological study. They are not equipment to purchase or copy from the papers' dimensions. The available sources give no cleaning or maintenance protocol, do not specify the stone type of the studied examples, and do not establish a modern food-safety method. The evidence supports describing these stone forms and excavated placements, but not recommending a substitute or claiming that a replica would reproduce Natufian processing. This entry records specific archaeological equipment and does not imply that its proposed use has been settled.