The Jerusalem City-Dump in the Late Second Temple Period

The excavations carried out in recent years by the authors on the eastern slope of the City of David (reich/shukron 2000, 329.337) have encountered, in almost every excavation area, an extremely thick layer of loose debris just under surface. This layer is made of earth, loose rubble, small stones and a large amount of broken artifacts (mainly pottery shards with fragments of stone and glass vessels, coins, etc.), as well as broken animal bones. It seems to be ordinary household garbage, which was dumped down the slope, as is characterized by the slanting bedding lines of the debris. These bedding lines have a constant gradient of approx imately 32 degrees, and they show occasional sorting of the components according to mass and size (Taf. 1). This layer of debris is considerably thick, approximately 6-8m on the average. In our Area C (to the west and to the south of the spring house) it reaches even a thickness of 9 m. Each of the R. weill and Y. shiloh expeditions recorded even 10m (see below). It should be noted that such a phenomenon, dated to the late Second Temple period, is not present on any other side of the immediate outskirts of the city. We may conclude that these deposits contain simple household garbage, of discarded artifacts and waste, and that the area defined above has no connection to any glacis. It simply represents the city-dump. Within the slanting layers of debris no constructions were found. Only in the area close to spring (our Area C), several roughly built terrace-walls were found, built into the loose debris. These terrace-walls were probably the outcome of attempts to stabilize the loose slope, and prevent the debris that was tumbling down, from covering and blocking the outer access to the water. These walls proved useless for this purpose, and were replaced by a stone barrel-shaped vault, built directly above the spring. The inner, westernmost part of this vault, survived to present times. The lowest layers of this debris were found resting directly upon this inner part of vault, thus dating its construction ( reich/Shukron 1999, 60). These thick debris layers were already observed and noted by other scholars who were active on the eastern slope of the City of David prior to our excavations, but little has been elaborated on it.