El Wad
Epipalaeolithic archaeological site in Mount Carmel, Israel
El Wad is an archaeological site of the Epipalaeolithic Near East in Mount Carmel, Israel. The site has two components: El Wad Cave, also known as Mughārat al-Wād (Arabic: مغارة الواد) or HaNahal Cave (Hebrew: מערת הנחל, lit. 'The Stream Cave'); and El Wad Terrace, located immediately outside the cave.
Together with the nearby sites of Tabun Cave, Jamal Cave, and Skhul Cave, el Wad is part of the Nahal Me'arot Nature Reserve, a national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Background and research history
El Wad is one of a number of significant prehistoric archaeological sites in the caves of Wadi el-Mughara in Mount Carmel, now protected as the national nature reserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site. However in the 1920s, very little was known of the prehistory of the region, and the sites were threatened by quarrying for the construction of the Port of Haifa. In 1928, British archaeologist Charles Lambert conducted a trial excavation at El Wad on behalf of the Department of Antiquities of Mandatory Palestine to assess the area's archaeological value. Lambert's findings, especially the "sensational" discovery of a bone handle carved in the shape of an animal, "the first prehistoric work of art recorded from the Near East", established the scientific importance of the caves and prevented them being destroyed in the quarrying.
The following year, the Department of Antiquities asked Dorothy Garrod to suspend her excavations at Shuqba Cave to deal with the "urgent matter" of investigating the el-Mughara caves. Garrod directed large-scale excavations at El Wad for the next six years. She quickly recognised similarities between the stone tools found at El Wad and her previous excavations at Shuqba cave, naming the newly discovered industry the Natufian, after Wadi en-Natuf near Shuqba, and tentatively linking it to the European Mesolithic, based on the fact that both used microlithic technology.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “El Wad” is epipalaeolithic archaeological site in Mount Carmel, Israel. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Epipalaeolithic, archaeological and site, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9252252. VIAF identifies the subject as 315139356. The Library of Congress control number is sh00005051. Authority coordinates are 32.671, 34.966. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “El Wad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.