From about the late first century BCE, a stone-vessel industry emerged in ancient Palestine which produced a unique corpus of chalkstone vessels whose distribution is virtually limited to Jewish sites.

Many scholars link the use of these vessels with Jewish purity practices. In a lecture entitled ‘Pure Stone: The Jewish Stone-Vessel Industry and Ritual-Purity Practices in the First Two Centuries of the Common Era’, Dennis Mizzi, senior lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Judaism at the University of Malta, will present an overview of ritual purity in ancient Judaism while also exploring the use of chalkstone vessels within this framework.

In addition, Mizzi will present preliminary results from the recent excavation of a stone-vessel workshop at Einot Amitai (near Nazareth).

The talk is part of the Archaeological Society Malta lecture series, sponsored by APS Bank, and will be held at the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage, 173, St Christopher Street, Valletta tomorrow at 6pm. For more information visit  www.archsoc.org.mt.