A forensics expert for the local police department, Ido Hefetz has been working with the archaeologist Shulamit Terem to study the fingerprints left many centuries ago on ceramics found in the Motza neighborhood of Jerusalem. Hillel Kutler writes:

Beginning in November 2019, excavations at the three-acre site uncovered traces of structures and artifacts from the early Byzantine period (the end of the 4th century CE to the beginning of the 7th century): a church, an olive press, a wine press, and a kiln. An alcove adjacent to the kiln contained clay fragments of lamps and roof tiles, with remnants of jugs and bowls lying nearby. . . . More than one-third of the 230 shards were covered in centuries-old fingerprints.

The clay used to make the pottery was of fine quality, ensuring the prints were well preserved. Hefetz could plainly see that the fingerprints were predominantly of the left and right thumbs, with their depth revealing something of the potters’ technique: oth thumbs were pressed hard into the clay to compress it into a mold.

Furthermore, the same adjacent thumbprints appeared on both the top and bottom sections of each lamp, suggesting that one person had multitasked. Scores of the fingerprints were identical, leading Hefetz to conclude that one individual was the primary potter. One or possibly two additional people produced the rest of the lamps. Most revelatory on a fundamental level was Hefetz’s realization that fingerprint patterns today are virtually unchanged from 1,500 years ago.

With further work, Hefetz hopes to be able to draw conclusions about the age and sex of the potters.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.