Jerusalem Road Project Runs Into Past, Turns Into Dig

After 16 years of haggling, a license was granted for widening a road next to the wall of Jerusalem’s Old City. But work was halted days later when a bulldozer uncovered a Byzantine bathhouse no one knew existed.

It’s a typical hazard for developers in Jerusalem, a city that dates back about 3,500 years and where a shovel put in the ground almost anywhere can turn up archeological artifacts.

“We have an overload of history here,” said Aharon Meir, a city archeologist. “That’s what makes Jerusalem different. If you don’t bother to check, you can simply bulldoze important findings away.”

Meir supervises the archeological dig launched where construction crews have temporarily ceased building a 820-foot stretch of the new Mamilla Road.

The finds so far indicate that contrary to earlier belief, the roughly square-mile walled city may have once extended beyond the current walls, Meir said.

The new road runs near the Old City’s Jaffa Gate, built by the Turkish ruler Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th Century. Although long considered a possible archeological site, the area was never excavated by researchers.

For years, it was off-limits as a battlefield or cease-fire zone between Israeli and Arab armies. After Israel captured it and the rest of east Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, other sections of the city were given priority by archeologists.

One example was “King David’s City,” near the holy Al Aqsa Mosque, and the Wailing Wall remnant of the ancient Jewish temples.

At the Jaffa Gate, excavators have dug more than 2,000 years into the past, stopping when they hit bedrock that indicated they had found the earliest settlement.

Two structures so far uncovered--a bathhouse and a large public building yet to be identified--have been tentatively dated from the Byzantine period of the Roman Empire, or about the 4th Century.

Also discovered by Meir, helped by several dozen Palestinian laborers, is an intricate web of water cisterns, apparently part of an aqueduct system that supplied the ancient city’s water.

“These may not look like stupendous finds, but they provide little important tidbits of information about what life was like. If we give up these little things, we would miss the larger picture,” Meir said.

Meir said the planned road will likely be completed eventually, but the section adjacent to the dig may have to be diverted or lifted onto an overpass that would allow tourists to see the ancient ruins underneath.

Under a city ordinance, contractors must sponsor an archeological survey of any building site if historical relics are found during construction. Usually, a compromise is worked out so building can continue.

The new road is part of a $250-million project to build a hotel, apartment buildings and a shopping plaza in Mamilla, a predominantly Arab quarter before Israel’s 1948 independence war.

Several plans for developing Mamilla have been shelved since 1973 amid huge disputes between planners and environmentalists. Among other complaints, the environmentalists expressed fears the new road could increase pollution, causing damage to old buildings.

In the current project, a compromise was struck in which the planned road was narrowed from six to three lanes and several old structures were spared being leveled.

Officials of the Karta Company, developers of Mamilla, said they hope the latest delay will not last beyond the end of the month so they can meet their building schedule. But they take it philosophically.

The latest complication in the Mamilla plan is typical of what most building projects in Jerusalem have faced in the last two decades, ranging from housing developments in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City to the Hebrew University campus on Mt. Scopus.

Last year, preparations for a shopping mall were halted when excavators found two prehistoric farming villages from the Bronze Age at the city’s southern outskirts. A compromise to allow building of the mall is reportedly being worked out.