family’s adopted surname, Netanyahu, citing it
as a physical token of Jerusalem’s Jewish past.
Politics, religion, and archaeology have long
been deeply entwined here. Around A.D. 327, Byz-
antine empress Helena presided over the dem-
olition of a Roman temple. “She opened up the
earth, scattered the dust, and found three crosses
in disarray,” according to a nearly contemporary
source. The elderly mother of Constantine the
Great, she declared one to be the piece of wood
on which Jesus was crucified. What was hailed as
the True Cross, the most famous of Christian arti-
facts, helped spark interest in sacred Christian
relics. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre soon
rose over the site.
Some 1,500 years later, a French scholar and
politician named Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart
de Saulcy launched the city’s first archaeological
excavation and sparked another craze. In 1863 he
dug out a complex of elaborate tombs, enraging
local Jews who filled in at night what his work-
ers exposed in the day. Undeterred, de Saulcy“T RUTH SHALL SPRING OUT of the earth,” say the
Psalms, but whose truth is the question that
haunts Jerusalem. In a city central to the three
great monotheistic faiths, putting a spade into
the ground can have immediate and far- reaching
consequences. In few places on Earth can an
archaeological excavation so quickly spark a
riot, threaten a regional war, or set the entire
world on edge.
After the Israeli government opened a new exit
to an underground passage along a part of the
Western Wall in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter
in 1996, some 120 people across the region died
during violent protests. Subsequent squabbling
over who should control what lies beneath the
sacred platform that Jews refer to as Har HaBa-
yit (the Temple Mount) and Arabs call Haram al
Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) helped scuttle the
Oslo peace accord. Even the recent construction
of Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance has come
under fire for destroying Muslim graves.
“Archaeology in Jerusalem is so sensitive that
it touches not just the research community but
politicians and the general public,” acknowl-
edges Yuval Baruch of the Israel Antiquities
Authority (IAA). Baruch is chief of the IAA’s busy
Jerusalem office, and he’s proud of his unofficial
title as the mayor of underground Jerusalem.
Under his reign the city has become one of the
world’s busiest archaeological sites, with around
a hundred excavations a year.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud
Abbas has complained that the constant dig-
ging is part of a campaign to overwhelm 1,400
years of Muslim heritage with Jewish finds.
“Here archaeology is not merely about scientific
knowledge—it is a political science,” adds Yusuf
Natsheh, director of Islamic archaeology for the
Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, the religious founda-
tion that oversees Jerusalem’s Muslim holy sites.
Baruch hotly denies any bias in what’s exca-
vated. Whether Canaanite or crusader, each
era gets its scientific due, he insists. There is
no doubt that Israeli archaeologists are among
the best trained in the world. Yet there’s also no
doubt that archaeology is wielded as a political
weapon in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Israe-
lis having the edge since they control all exca-
vation permits in and around Jerusalem. At a
speech in 2011 before the United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly, the Israeli prime minister said
he kept in his office a 2,800-year-old signet ring
found near the Western Wall inscribed with his
hauled to the Louvre an ancient sa
containing the remains of what he cl
an early Jewish queen.
Other European explorers arriv
their own biblical treasures. In 1867
dispatched a young Welshman to pro
lem’s underground terrain. Charles W
local crews to dig deep shafts and tu
kept his work from the prying eyes o
officials who then controlled Jerusal
digging proved difficult, he used dy
clear pockets of stone. Warren’s as
exploits—he once explored a sewag
by laying old doors across the muck
remarkably precise maps are still a w
another legacy may be an enduring m
archaeologists among the city’s Mus
A century later, when Israel capt
Jerusalem, including the Old City,
forces during the 1967 Six Day Wa
archaeologists launched major scien
vations that became a centerpiece of