The Yabroud Rock Shelters (Iskafta Valley)

A row of rock shelters along the northern slope of the Iskafta valley, next to Yabroud. This is not a monument but an excavation site. Its layers held stone tools from about 200 thousand years ago down to the Natufian period, and the Levant’s Middle Palaeolithic “Yabrudian” phase is named after it. There is no building to see; what there is to see is the rock itself and the long story of research behind it.

Can you visit today

That could not be confirmed. There is no current information on the state of the track into the valley, on whether any visitor arrangements exist, or on the risk of unexploded ordnance left from the fighting of 2014. Yabroud was a front line in the spring of 2014. For that reason this page gives no directions. Ask local officials or people in Yabroud before heading into the valley, and do not go onto unmarked paths alone.

Who found it, and who dug

The German amateur archaeologist Alfred Rust came across the shelters by chance in 1930 and dug four seasons between 1930 and 1933. He published the results in 1950 as “Die Höhlenfunde von Jabrud”; Mohammad Qaddour translated the book into Arabic in 1987. Rust’s 15-kilometre surface survey recorded six shelters and a cave. Father Joseph Nasrallah followed, between 1934 and 1940. Ralph and Rose Solecki of Columbia University worked here in 1963-1965 and 1987-1989. A Japanese team worked in the Mashkouna and Harayya valleys in 1967-1968, and Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen dug in the Mashkouna valley in 2007-2010.

The shelters one by one

• Shelter I matters most: 35 metres long at the foot of the cliff, about 6 metres deep and about 20 metres high. Its fill, more than 11 metres thick, holds 25 layers covering roughly 200 thousand to 40 thousand years ago.
• Shelter II is 20 metres wide and 8 metres deep. Graves were cut into the ledge along its inner face in Roman times. Its 10 layers belong to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic.
• Shelter III is two joined, rounded hollows of about 7 metres each; its fill is Epipalaeolithic, meaning Natufian.
• Shelter IV, on Jabal Shmeis, measures 20 by 8 metres and stands 8 metres high. Its 22 layers are older than those of Shelter I.
• Cave I opens with a mouth 13 metres wide and 7 metres high and runs 30 metres inside; it was used as a dwelling in historical times.

What “Yabrudian” means

Thick scrapers, hand axes and the “Amudian” blades, counted as the first stone blade industry. Wherever this set of tools turns up in the Levant, it is called Yabrudian. Nasrallah counted at least twenty prehistoric sites within 6 kilometres of the town.

What most people miss

The story of the obsidian scraper from layer 4 of Shelter II. This small tool, dated to about 41 thousand to 32 thousand years ago, came from Göllü Dağ in central Anatolia, according to an analysis by Frahm and colleagues in 2017. That is at least 700 kilometres away on foot.