Overview
- Archaeologists announced July 20 that excavations in the Givati Parking Lot of the City of David uncovered large charred wooden beams that excavation directors link to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.
- Excavation leaders say the beams collapsed as a roof over an inner courtyard and were exceptionally preserved when plaster melted in the fire and sealed the timbers under rubble for about 2,600 years.
- Researchers led by Dr. Johanna Regev are collecting the many visible tree-growth rings in the field so they can apply dendrochronology with the goal of narrowing the date of the destruction from multi-century ranges to roughly a ten-year window.
- Directors interpret the sealed collapse and later deliberate sealing by Persian‑period rebuilders as a preserved 'landscape of memory,' a point emphasized by officials and underscored by the find’s timing just before Tisha B’Av.
- Conservation and laboratory analysis are ongoing at the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University, and a more precise dating could shift scholarly timelines for Jerusalem’s Iron Age layers and affect archaeological debates about the period.