70 Scientific American, April 2022ties for investigators. Naturally crumbly, limestone landscapes har-
bor subterranean caves and streams. In Jerusalem, millennia of
quarrying and destruction have left behind tons of small chips. What
seems like solid rock is actually a gravelly sediment called shingle
that can turn liquid in an instant. “The shingle would suddenly burst
in like water, burying our tools and sometimes partially our work-
men,” one British excavator complained in the 1860s. Archaeolo-
gists have been complaining ever since. As recently as 2018, a col-
lapse brought down tons of rocky debris at one archaeological dig.
And then there are the threats from above. Unlike ancient sites
such as Babylon in Iraq, Jerusalem remains a living city crammed
with shrines that draw a constant stream of Jewish, Christian and
Muslim pilgrims. Simply digging a hole can be viewed as an act of
disrespect or outright aggression. When the French senator con-
ducted the first legal excavation at a Jewish tomb there in 1863,
there was an outcry in Jewish communities around the world. A few
years later Muslims worried that British digs aimed to undermine
the walls holding up the city’s acropolis, what Jews call the Temple
Mount and Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif. (This wasn’t as out-
landish a fear as it might sound, given that the expedition leader
was using gunpowder to blast his way through the rock below.)
Ever since, excavations there have periodically prompted dem-
onstrations, sparked bloody riots and set off international crises,
with participants getting assaulted and chased by mobs. Archae-
ology in Jerusalem is not for the faint of heart.At the end of world wAr i, Ottoman rule gave way to control by the
British, who in turn relinquished Palestine in 1948, leaving behind
warring Jewish and Arab factions to battle for command of the
region. In the aftermath, the new state of Israel’s capital was in
West Jerusalem. Jordanian forces controlled East Jerusalem, which
included the Old City and most of the ancient sites and shrines. The
power structures changed again in the Six-Day War of 1967, when
Israel conquered East Jerusalem and incorporated it into its capi-
tal, although most nations still consider this area occupied territory.
For the first time, Jewish Israelis had a chance to probe under-
neath the city even as they reshaped it above. Unlike Robinson and
his mostly Christian successors, this new generation of biblical
archaeologists was overwhelmingly made up of agnostics and athe-
ists with little interest in proving the truth of scripture. But they
were also nationalists fascinated by the Jewish past and viewed the
Bible as a foundational text of their new homeland. Benjamin
Mazar, a famous archaeologist and president of Hebrew Univer-
sity in Jerusalem, was unapologetic about their bias. “Biblical
archaeology was part of Zionist idealism,” he said in a 1984 inter-
view in Biblical Archaeology Review.
Mazar and his colleagues found luxurious villas, grand avenuesEXC AVATION in a former parking lot just south of the Old City
reveals evidence from the sixth century B.C.E. to the early
Muslim period a millennium later (left), including a gold earring
from the Hellenistic era in the third century B.C.E. (right).