Jericho excavations and the chronology of its destruction

Record summary

Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Tell es-Sultan from 1952 to 1958 radically reassessed the site’s Bronze Age sequence and the evidence for a Late Bronze Age destruction. Her stratigraphic conclusions were widely used to challenge a simple archaeological confirmation of the biblical conquest narrative, while later excavators and radiocarbon specialists revisited the chronology. Jericho matters for comparing stratigraphy, ceramic dating, radiocarbon evidence and textual traditions. The debate concerns both the date and interpretation of destruction layers, and the biblical text cannot automatically be treated as an excavation report.