Following the results of last year’s cleaning and excavation inside the so-called Renaissance Tomb Schmid/Huguenot/al-B’dool 2004. , we decided to carry out a small test trench measuring 4 m x 4 m in front of the tomb where one would expect the path leading towards the Wadi Farasa East to meet an eventual structure built in front of the tomb. However, besides two huge boulders maybe belonging to a wall, no built structures were found (Fig. 19), just substantial amounts of Nabataean pottery dating to the early 1st century AD.
Fig. 19: Trench in front of the Renaissance Tomb (photo: S. G. Schmid)
Sylvie Duchesne, anthropologist of the CNRS Toulouse (France) studied all the human remains collected in 2003 inside the Renaissance Tomb. Despite the fact that all the tombs were disturbed, interesting results regarding age, sex and diseases of the people buried inside the tomb were obtained. Since due to the absence of detailed written sources we do not know a lot about the funerary customs of the Nabataeans, a series of samples was taken in order to carry out DNA analysis. This should hopefully allow to get some information about parental relationships between the different subjects.
