Museum of Yarmukian Culture

מוזיאון התרבות הירמוכית

Museum · Prehistory · The Neolithic period · Yarmukian culture · Clay figurines and incised pebbles

Kibbutz Sha'ar HaGolan, Jordan Valley, Sha'ar HaGolan

Israel's first prehistory museum, at Kibbutz Sha'ar HaGolan above the Yarmuk, showing the 7,500-year-old Neolithic culture found in the kibbutz's fields

In 1941, when fish ponds were dug in the fields of Sha'ar HaGolan, kibbutz members found pottery sherds, flint tools, bones, incised pebbles and figurines; an archaeological expedition dug there in 1949 and 1950 and named the find the Yarmukian culture, from the Neolithic period, when people turned from gathering food to growing it. The museum was declared in 1950 as the first prehistoric museum in Israel; its finds were first shown in a shelter, and in the 1980s the present building, overlooking the Yarmuk, was put up. It shows a 7,500-year-old material culture: clay figurines, river pebbles incised with stylised human figures, probably used in worship, pottery, basalt grinding tools and hunting and work tools of flint, and its site says finds from the excavation are also shown in the British Museum, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the entrance stand three stainless-steel sculptures 3 metres tall by the artist Tamara Rickman, echoing the incised pebbles; a film on the excavation is screened in several languages, and families can grind wheat in stone mortars, paint jars and work with clay.