Why Were Two Roman Marble Statues Buried Face-Down in an Ancient Winepress Near Caesarea?

Two Roman marble busts, carved roughly 1,700 years ago, were found deliberately buried face-down in the collection pit of a Roman-Byzantine winepress near Binyamina, inland from Caesarea, Israel. One of them carries a Greek inscription reading “Lycurgus.” The Israel Antiquities Authority has stated that the reason they were hidden is not yet known.

The Discovery Near Caesarea

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered the pieces during excavations for the “Connecting Israel” rail project, at a site inland from Caesarea, the stunning Roman port city originally constructed by Herod the Great along the Mediterranean coast. Caesarea was no provincial backwater — it was one of the most strategically and culturally significant cities in the entire eastern Mediterranean, serving as a hub of Roman imperial power, commerce, and culture for centuries.

Both pieces are protomes — sculptures rendering the head and upper torso rather than the full figure. They were crafted from fine marble in the 2nd or 3rd century CE and show a remarkable level of artistic skill, indicating they almost certainly once occupied a place of public or civic prominence. One of the two bears a Greek inscription — a rare additional find that adds significant historical weight to the discovery.

Why Were They Hidden in a Winepress?

The honest answer is that nobody knows. The Israel Antiquities Authority’s own statement on the find says the reason the busts were hidden there is undetermined, offering only that the burial may have been meant to protect them. What the excavation does establish is the timing: the busts were placed in the pit face-down when the winepress went out of use, which means they were already old objects — antiques, by the standards of the people who buried them — at the moment they went into the ground.

The most frequently raised interpretation is religious. As the Roman Empire progressively Christianized following Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 CE, pagan imagery and statuary came under increasing threat, and figurative sculptures tied to polytheistic worship were defaced or smashed during waves of iconoclasm. Burying valued classical works face-down in a disused winepress would have been an effective way to keep them out of sight. That reading fits the evidence, but it remains a hypothesis rather than a conclusion the excavators have drawn.

A winepress floor is not a glamorous hiding place, and that may have been precisely the point. Placing the pieces face-down could have been practical, shielding the carved surfaces from damage, or deliberate concealment. The excavation cannot yet distinguish between the two.

Who Hid Them — and Why Did They Never Return?

This is the haunting question at the heart of the discovery. The person or people who put the busts in that pit never came back to retrieve them. Whether they perished, fled, were prevented from returning, or simply could not risk exposure, we will never know. What is certain is that the outcome was preservation — the pieces sat intact beneath the ground for roughly a millennium and a half while the Byzantine Empire rose and crumbled, the Crusades swept through the region, and the modern world took shape above them.

The Greek Inscription: “Lycurgus”

One of the two busts is inscribed in Greek with a single name: Lycurgus. Greek remained the dominant language of culture, administration, and intellectual life in the eastern Roman Empire long after Latin dominated the west, so a Greek label on a piece of Roman-period sculpture is exactly what one would expect here.

The name itself is the puzzle, because two very different figures from Greek history carry it. Lycurgus of Sparta is the semi-legendary lawgiver credited with founding the Spartan constitution and its austere military society — a figure whose historicity is itself debated. Lycurgus of Athens was a real and well-documented 4th-century BCE statesman and orator who managed Athenian finances and oversaw a major program of public building. A Roman-era patron might plausibly have commissioned either: the Spartan as an emblem of discipline and law, the Athenian as a model of civic administration.

Which of them the bust portrays has not been settled, and the inscription alone does not resolve it.

What This Find Tells Us About the Ancient World

Discoveries like this one illuminate how people navigated cultural and religious upheaval in antiquity. Rather than passive victims of historical change, individuals made active choices — sometimes at great personal risk — about what to keep and what to let go. The Binyamina busts are a reminder that those choices are often legible only in their consequences: we can see that someone carefully placed two valuable objects out of sight, and we cannot yet see why.

The find also underscores how much of the ancient world remains buried and waiting. This stretch of coast has yielded extraordinary artifacts before, but a pair of intact marble protomes carrying a Greek inscription, sealed beneath a disused winepress, is rare by any measure — and a reminder that a routine infrastructure dig can still surface something a museum would build a room around.