NAZARETH (Israel), DEC 23: In the time of Jesus, his fellow villagers in Nazareth made their living by growing grapes, olives and grain on terraces cut into the limestone hills.

At harvest time, all 300 villagers, which most likely also included Jesus, would stomp grapes to extract juice and huddle in watchtowers at night to guard their produce against thieves.

These images emerge from excavations of the only pristine farmland left in the centre of Nazareth, now a cramped city of 60,000. The finds may fill in some blanks about Jesus' boyhood and perhaps lead to better understanding of the older man, says Stephen Pfann, an American bible scholar and archaeologist.

``As a child he walked about these hills and saw the animals and plants and people working in the fields. He used these images in building his parables later on,'' said Pfann, who heads Jerusalem's center for the study of early Christianity. Even though Jesus spent much of his life in Nazareth, from about age three until his late 20s, little is known about what he did there, said Rev Jerome Murphy o'Connor, a scholar at Jerusalem's Ecole Biblique.

It is believed that Jesus followed the trade of his father, Joseph, a carpenter. Joseph may have chosen to settle in Nazareth because it was within walking distance of Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee which at the time was being completely rebuilt following its destruction by the Romans, Murphy o'Connor said.

By comparison, Nazareth was tiny, with two or three clans living in 35 homes spread over six acres, Pfann said. The homes later were razed by invaders: What remains are several basement caves, cisterns and silos excavated in the late 1950s during reconstruction of the Church of the Annunciation.

While walking along the terraced slopes of the Nazareth hospital grounds earlier this year, Pfann stumbled across an ancient manmade basin used for making wine a bed-sized level area cut into the limestone for squashing grapes, and a vat below for collecting the runoff juice.

A dig began in April, with support from the hospital and local volunteers. Since then, Pfann and archaeologist Ross Joseph Voss have laid bare two agricultural terraces, the bases of five watchtowers in the fields, and stone irrigation channels from a now-dry spring to lower-lying terraces.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.