Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeologists uncovered a 1,500-year-old Byzantine street beneath Jerusalem that once connected the city’s most important churches.
• The underground excavation revealed layers of ruins spanning from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. through the Early Islamic period.
• The discovery highlights a major sixth-century urban revival in the City of David that ended with the Persian and Muslim conquests of Byzantine Jerusalem.

Ancient artifacts can literally be found beneath anyone’s feet in Israel. As a result, planned construction sites need to undergo thorough archaeological excavations before work begins. When a team of archaeologists—led by Moran Hagbi and Joe Uziel of the Israel Antiquities Authority—investigated along a paved Late Byzantine street in advance of the development of the City of David’s Visitor Center, what they unearthed was no less than extraordinary.

Layers of history lie beneath the City of David (or Ir David), which was once the hub of ancient Jerusalem. According to biblical tradition, King David declared it the capital of Israel around 3,000 years ago. This resilient city has since undergone many shifts in power that resulted in collapse and reconstruction, and the excavation by Hagbi and Uziel’s team revealed ruins from several of those phases. Starting with the substructure of a street from the Early Roman Period, sealed beneath a layer of ash and collapsed stones from the destruction of the Second Temple in the wake of Roman conquest in 70 C.E., the team went on to find relics of the Late Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic periods. Most were the remnants of roads that had been buried as empires were conquered and vanished. Their primary find, however, was part of a street that had been built during Byzantine rule and subsequently abandoned.

“The street, previously exposed in other excavations, was a primary south–north artery running along the Tyropoeon Valley and linking between the City of David and the upper parts of Jerusalem,” the archaeologists said in a study recently published in ‘Atiquot. “This street was likely an important route, leading from the Siloam Church to other important churches, such as the Nea Church and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Portions of what’s now known as the Byzantine Street were first discovered in the 1920s. It was dated to the Late Byzantine Period, around the mid-sixth century C.E., about a hundred years before the Byzantine Empire lost control of the region. More of the street was later discovered at the Giv’ati Parking Lot and another site nearby, bringing the total length exposed over the years to about 394 feet (120 meters). Adding to that total, Uziel and Hagbi needed to remove over ten feet of sediment as they excavated, gradually unburying sections that formed another part of the street. In doing so, they uncovered layers of ruins left behind during different time periods. The earliest layer was built sometime during the first century C.E., in the Early Roman Period, and consisted of a drainage channel and the larger Stepped Street, built in the Second Temple era as a path pilgrims would take to the Temple.

Unlike the main stretch of the Stepped Street, which is exceptionally well-preserved, despite the passing centuries, this unpaved part of the pilgrimage road was covered in ash from the destruction of the Second Temple. The presence of coins dating back to the First Jewish Revolt against the Romans further supported its dating to 66–70 C.E. Built on top of that shroud of ash and dust were two walls constructed during the Middle to Late Roman Period, sometime between the second and early sixth centuries C.E. The specialized way they were constructed—with small and medium-sized fieldstones at lower levels, while small stones were used to level the surface—was typical of Roman architecture from that time period. It’s thought that some of the stones that collapsed during the 70 C.E. destruction of Jerusalem were later salvaged and reused to build one of the walls. The other wall had stone fill packed against its western side, suggesting it may have served as a retaining wall to stabilize the slope of the Tyropoeon Valley.

All of these earlier roads and walls were eventually buried under the next chapter of the site’s history. During the sixth and seventh centuries C.E., what remained was covered in a mixture of earth, small stones, animal bone fragments, and shards of pottery and glass. This appears to have been meant as infrastructure for the Byzantine Street itself. This gently sloping part of the street is paved with timeworn flagstones, covered with a mess of larger stones on its southern end, and missing any traces of the curbstones or sidewalk found in other sections. The larger stones may have been remains from a collapsed Byzantine building that once stood close to the site. Also found were a cistern and four drainage channels, three of which were plastered over. These were so similar to channels found in the Giv’ati Parking Lot that it’s possible all of them were part of a more expansive drainage system.

The street’s story didn’t end with the Byzantines, though. To the west of the street, a semicircular room built between the seventh and mid-eighth centuries C.E. was exposed. The room consisted of a curved stone wall and a white plaster floor that sealed some of the earlier drainage channels. Nearby, an adjacent wall had a layer of intact roof tiles, pottery, and glass sherds on its western side. Other poorly preserved walls in the vicinity may have been built using stones scavenged from the collapsed debris above the paved street, much of which had been cleared away and dumped into a nearby cistern. While it’s not certain, a kiln found in the Giv’ati Parking Lot likely was used for lime-plaster production. A separate excavation nearby discovered a small metallurgical workshop that was in use during the Early Islamic Period. The youngest remains at the site are stone walls that date to the eighth century C.E., and pottery fragments from the 19^th century suggest a forgotten earlier excavation.

“[Our] most significant find is the Byzantine-period street segment,” Hagbi and Uziel said. “Together with other segments further to the south, [it] stresses the urban development on the City of David spur during the sixth century C.E.”