Walls of Jericho Stratigraphy

Tell es-Sultan, biblical Jericho, is one of the most excavated sites in the Levant. Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger dug it from 1907-1909, John Garstang from 1930-1936, and Kathleen Kenyon from 1952-1958. Garstang identified a city destroyed in the late fifteenth century BC that he linked to Joshua. Kenyon, using more refined ceramic typology, redated the destruction to around 1550 BC — roughly 150 years too early to coincide with most reconstructions of the Israelite conquest.\n\nIn 1990, Bryant Wood published a re-analysis in Biblical Archaeology Review arguing that Kenyon's dating was based on negative evidence (absence of certain ceramic types) and that a late-fifteenth-century destruction could be sustained by the data. Wood emphasized the collapsed walls falling outward (consistent with Joshua 6:20), stored grain found in situ (consistent with a short siege), and evidence of the city burning rather than being looted.\n\nIn 2013, Lorenzo Nigro and the Italian-Palestinian team resumed excavation, and new radiocarbon analyses have continued to refine the picture. The honest position is: Jericho's walls did fall, the destruction matches the pattern of Joshua 6 in striking ways, but the date remains contested at about a 150-year margin. This is one of the clearest cases where archaeology and Scripture interact productively without delivering a decisive verdict.