April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 71and even the ancient world’s most impressive pedestrian overpass,
all dating to the era of King Herod the Great and his successors,
who ruled Judea under Rome’s authority in the century before and
during the time of Jesus. When an internal civil war turned into
an uprising against the empire, Roman legions destroyed Jerusa-
lem in c.e. 70. These discoveries electrified the Jewish public by
bringing to light physical evidence of the time when it was a
famous and prosperous Jewish city. “Israeli archaeologists, pro-
fessional and amateurs, are not merely digging for knowledge and
objects, but for the reassurance of roots,” wrote Israeli author
Amos Elon in 1971. The finds also drew the attention of Israeli pol-
iticians, who were quick to cite the physical evidence to bolster
their controversial claim to the Holy City.
Palestinians decried such excavations as twisting science for
political purposes, favoring the Jewish past at the expense of the
city’s ancient Canaanite and later Christian and Muslim heritage.
“We were put in the freezer for 2,000 years,” says Nazmi Al Jubeh,
a Palestinian archaeologist at Birzeit University, referring to the
lack of emphasis on the two millennia following the Roman
destruction. There were important exceptions, such as when Israeli
archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov uncovered half a dozen huge palaces
dated to the seventh century c.e., shortly after the arrival of Arab
Muslims in the city, and the discovery of a major and long-lost Byz-
antine Christian church. Yet there is no disputing that the Jerusa-
lem digs in the decade following the Six-Day War—and the media
coverage accompanying the resulting finds—were weighted heav-
ily to the Jewish past.
Meanwhile archaeologists in Europe and North America were
embracing new research methods and technological advances.
Rather than focusing on unearthing monumental buildings,
museum-quality artifacts and evidence of long-dead kings, these
excavators sought to know more about how ordinary people lived,
what trade routes tied disparate peoples together and what shifts
in material culture revealed about societal changes. Using new
techniques, researchers could be far more precise in dating arti-
facts, and by sifting carefully through dirt, they could produce sam-
ples that cast light on diet, disease, commerce and ritual.
Researchers in Jerusalem remained deeply conservative in their
approach to studying the past, however. The continued quest to
find the city conquered by the Bible’s King David and glorified by
his son King Solomon after 1000 b.c.e.—still missing after more
than a century of digging—took precedence over questions about
diet and disease. Even those archaeological techniques in wide use
elsewhere met with suspicion. Carbon 14 dating, for instance, was
dismissed out of hand by researchers who contended that its mar-
gin of error allowed one to argue that the age of any given find was
whatever one wanted it to be.
The matter came to a head in the 1990s, when Tel Aviv Univer-
sity archaeologist Israel Finkelstein attacked academic and bibli-
cal assumptions about the ages of sites around Israel, including
Jerusalem. After analyzing pottery from around the region, he con-
cluded that the archaeological “clock” previously used to date those
materials was off by a century. That meant buildings dated to
950 b.c.e. actually were built around 850 b.c.e. This might seem
an academic detail, but the implications were dramatic. Indeed,
they stood to “change the entire understanding of the history of
Israel,” Finkelstein wrote.
The most dramatic implication was that Jerusalem had never
been the large and glorious center of a brief empire ruled by a fab-
ulously wealthy King Solomon, as detailed in the Bible. Although
David and his famous son may have existed, Finkelstein and a
growing number of scholars saw them instead more akin to tribal
chieftains of a hilltop town.
This claim infuriated many of the more traditional excavators,
including Mazar’s granddaughter, the late Eilat Mazar. Like Rob-
inson in the 1830s, she set out to counter what she saw as a kind
of heresy. In 2005, while digging on the eastern side of a rocky spur
of land south of the city’s acropolis, Mazar uncovered what she
claimed was probably the palace of King David. Finkelstein and
others countered that her dating was faulty and that the structure
might have been built by Canaanites—a mix of ethnic groups who
inhabited the Levant 3,000 years ago—long before David was sup-
posed to have lived.F
ew were persuAded by Mazar’s interpretation, but the dispute
had the effect of radically altering the way archaeologists in
Jerusalem conducted fieldwork. The battle over the city’s past
shifted from interpreting biblical passages to arguing over hard
data. Excavators began to sift through each bucket of dirt, metic-
ulously counting fish bones, parsing seeds, and probing for tiny
bits of clay that might have been stamped with an administrative
seal that could reveal clues to the nature of trade and governance.
At Tel Aviv University, Finkelstein pushed to set up facilities that
could handle an array of archaeological analyses, from determin-
ing the nature of the residue in the bottom of a cup to studying
latrine samples to understand what illnesses plagued inhabitants.
The showcase of that transformation is best seen at a former
parking lot, located on the western side of the rocky spur of ridge
where Mazar dug up her building. “The archaeological sciences are
important tools that have been completely underused here in Jeru-
salem,” Tel Aviv’s Yuval Gadot says. Since 2017 he and Yiftah Shalev
of the Israel Antiquities Authority have been busy working their
way down through a city block–sized site that contains a rare cross
section of Jerusalem from the sixth century b.c.e. until the first cen-
turies of Arab Muslim control a millennium later.
In one case, the excavators used a novel technique that charts
changes in Earth’s geomagnetic field to determine the intensity
and speed of destruction of some of the site’s key structures. This
approach demonstrated that the burning and collapse of a major
administrative building from the sixth century b.c.e. was sudden,
rather than the result of small conflagrations and decay. The evi-
dence of this dramatic event clearly aligns with the destruction of
the Judean city by Babylonian forces in 586 b.c.e., described in
detail in the Bible.
Yet until recently, researchers’ understanding of what took place
in Jerusalem in the subsequent four centuries came almost entirely
from scripture because archaeologists had failed to find much
beyond a handful of potsherds from this time. That period extended
from the rule of the Persian Empire—which conquered the Baby-
lonians—to the Hellenistic successors of Alexander the Great, who
in turn swallowed the Persian regime.
By applying modern archaeological research methods, the park-
ing lot team has illuminated this largely unknown period. Meticu-
lous sifting of the excavated sediments, for example, revealed the
presence of tiny bat bones in the debris of the destroyed building,
showing that the site was abandoned for a time before refugees
crept back. The team also discovered that both before and after the
586 b.c.e. calamity, Judeans were importing fish from the Nile.