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Jericho is perhaps one of the most interesting archaeological sites in Palestine. Most people's familiarity with Jericho comes from the book of Joshua in the Old Testament. According to the Bible, the Israelites fleeing from Egypt destroyed the ancient city under mysterious circumstances. At the time, Jericho was supposedly surrounded by a formidable stone wall and should have been able to withstand attack. If the Old Testament story is accurate however, the walls came tumbling down. The ancient city of Jericho is located about 2km from the modern city of Jericho.
Evidence suggests that the city has been inhabited on and off through the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze-Iron ages; partly due to the areas good water supply, fertile land , and favorable climate. Perhaps the most important aspect of the site is its strategic location, which provided access to the heartland of Canaan. This would have made Jerico a prime target for the marauding Israelites on their way through Palestine.
Jericho was one of the first sites to be excavated in the Holy Land, second only to Jerusalem. The preliminary work was carried out in 1868 by Charles Warren, a British engineer. The first scientific excavations however, didn't come until 1907. Under two German archaeologists, Carl Watzinger and Ernest Sellin, a series of excavations were conducted from 1907-1909 and again in 1911. Hoping to validate the story of Jericho's destruction in the Old Testament, they collected a substantial amount of information that led them to believe the story of Joshua and the Israelites. Under closer examination of the data however , they concluded that Jericho had been unoccupied at the time the conquest would have occurred.
From 1930-1936 the site was excavated again, this time by British archaeologist John Garstang. Garstang's work revealed the remains of a network of collapsed walls (which he dated to about 1400 BC, the time he believed the Israelites were on their conquest) that had apparently fallen in a dramatic fashion as opposed to being ruined by abandonment or decay from natural forces. Disagreeing with Sellin and Watzinger's findings, he went on to say that the archaeological evidence did in fact, confirm the destruction of Jericho at the hands of the Israelites. Garstang's excavation techniques unfortunately were quite crude by today's standards and are thought to be only partially circumstantial.
Perhaps the best known and most accurate information from the Jericho site comes form yet another excavation under Kathleen Kenyan from 1952-1958. Her techniques were far superior to Garstang's and involved rigorous examination of the soil and very careful recording of its stratification. Kenyan was able to obtain a cross section of the city through its entire history by digging a narrow deep trench while maintaining clean and squared off edges. When presented with an area that would require wider areas to be excavated- the floor plan of a house for example- she carefully dug in measured squares while leaving an untouched strip between each section to allow the stratification to remain visible. Kenyan's main objective during her excavations at Jericho was to trace the history of the site back to it's earliest settlement. While trenching downward through the site she uncovered the first walled city along with a number of houses and courtyards that had been constructed over 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic. Kenyan was able to learn something about the city's early inhabitants from a tomb located near the deepest layers of the city. Inside the tomb were a number of skulls covered with clay. The skulls were dated at about the seventh millenium BC and were beautifully decorated with paint. Upon further excavation Kenyan maintained that the walls of Jericho had been repaired and rebuilt at least seventeen times. The damage may have been caused by earthquakes. The most recent of these walls (already dated to around 1400 BC by Garstang) was dated by Kenyan at 2300BC. Kenyan found no evidence of defensive structures that could confirm Garstang's previous claims that Jericho had been destroyed by the Israelites in the 15th century BC. In fact, she concluded that Jericho had lay in ruins for centuries before the Israelites even arrived. In short, there was nothing for Joshua to destroy.
Years later, another archaeologist named Bryant Wood would come up with another conclusion. In 1990 he published a reevaluation of Kenyan's work, challenging her assertion that the city was destroyed before the 15th century BC. He claims that an abundance of pottery located at the site coincides with other local pottery common to the time of 1400BC and points out that Garstang's account does seem to describe it. Also, carbon-14 testing of a sample of charcoal from the site indicated a date of 1410 BC. The radiocarbon date seems to validate Garstang's earlier claim that the city was destroyed around 1400 BC. Whether of not Joshua actually destroyed it will probably remain a mystery. All we know for sure is that the new work contributed by Wood neither confirms nor denies the possibility.
Welton Kings Archaeology page http://oowf.oo.utexas.edu/-welli/archaelogy/bible/jerico.html
Time Life Books; The Holy Land
Damian Woelfel