Unwinding the Stepped Stone Structure, Part 1: Macalister and Duncan
This archaeological landmark and the area around it has been progressively uncovered since 1923. This series explores each excavation from the perspective of its own time.
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If you have toured Jerusalem in any capacity, chances are good that you have found yourself standing at the foot of an archaeological landmark known as the “Stepped Stone Structure,” which sits today within the boundary of the El Ad-operated City of David Park. The manner of the structure’s display can easily create confusion for visitors trying to make sense of what they are seeing. Seating areas and support walls frame a select portion of the ruins, and, when combined with the limited signage, visitors may easily assume that the entire area was uncovered by one excavation. In reality, four major digs have progressively revealed the Stepped Stone Structure and nearby areas over the last 100 years. Additionally, only a small portion of what was uncovered during the course of these excavations is visible today.
In the scholarly literature about ancient Jerusalem, the Stepped Stone Structure is one of the most frequently discussed (and contested) archaeological features. These resources usually conflate data points from different excavations in order to summarize its component parts and relate them to scholarly discussion about Jerusalem’s past. While these contributions are important for their own purposes, in this occasional newsletter series, I want to take a different approach. We will attempt, as best as possible, to experience each iteration of the excavations that progressively uncovered the area around the Stepped Stone Structure from the point of view of its own time. Each dig was carried out with its own excavation methods, research goals, and unique interpretations of the finds. Each dig also added new information and challenged the conclusions of previous campaigns. In short, I want to follow the conversation around the Stepped Stone Structure as it developed within scholarship in real time. In part one, we rewind the clock to 1923 and explore the first expedition to dig in this area—that of the Palestine Exploration Fund under the direction of Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister and John Garrow Duncan (see part 2 here).
A new excavation
In late 1922 and at the very beginning of the British Mandate for Palestine, the Mandatory Department of Antiquities published an international call to excavations on Jerusalem’s Southeastern Hill. Special focus on this hill was due to recent excavations that had led the majority of scholars to identify it as the ancient core of Jerusalem and City of David. The hill was owned and farmed by residents of the nearby Silwan village, and British officials divided it into fields for excavation based on existing stone fences that ran between agricultural plots. International bodies interested in excavating were required to raise the necessary funds and negotiate a contract with land owners for the rights to dig on their property. In the end, the ambitious project was not very successful, but it did catch the interest of one well-established organization focused on archaeology in the Holy Land.
The call for excavations was formally published in the January 1923 edition of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement along with an article discussing potential archaeological finds. The PEF raised sufficient funding and appointed their seasoned archaeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, who was well-known for his former excavations at Gezer, to direct the dig. He was joined by John Garrow Duncan who had previously excavated in Egypt with William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the inventor of pottery dating. By October 1923, both had arrived in Palestine, and, after arduous agreements with the landowners, the dig was underway.
The first area chosen for excavation was known as “Field No. 5,” which sat just above the spring. This isolated the PEF’s site from other excavations further south and, importantly, put enough distance between it and the Noble Sanctuary to show that they did not have any aspirations about excavating there. Macalister wrote that suspicions in Jerusalem were still high after the notorious 1909-1911 excavations of Montague Parker, who was caught digging on the Haram platform after bribing a guard. His actions had not only enraged locals but even become something of an international incident. Macalister was eager to distance himself from it. Field No. 5 was also being used to grow cauliflowers, a relatively cheap crop to compensate for (as opposed to say, olives). Later the excavation would expand to additional agricultural plots to the south (Fields No. 7 and 9).
Introducing the Stepped Stone Structure
Among other things uncovered in their excavation areas, Macalister and Duncan were the first to reveal a large stone mantel known today as the “Stepped Stone Structure.” Throughout their publications, they refer to it as the “Jebusite Bastion” (they confusingly refer to everything they deemed to date before David as “Jebusite”). This “bastion” became their most famous discovery probably due to its preservation by the Mandatory Department of Antiquities as a national monument. Twenty three of its stepped courses were revealed.
Readers of this newsletter who are engaged in discussions about Jerusalem’s archaeology will know that, while the dating of the Stepped Stone Structure is debated, it is generally understood as a support for a large building that sat on top (variously interpreted as King David’s palace, the fortress of Zion, or another large building). However, it does not appear that Macalister and Duncan understand its function this way, even though they believed they had found the Fortress of Zion (II Sam. 5:7) situated on top of the hill above it. Duncan writes that it was a base providing support, not for a building, but for a “Jebusite” city wall which was built on top. Macalister thought that it served as part of a projection in the wall to help guard a nearby gate whose remains did not survive.
Along the line of the “Jebusite Bastion,” two towers were revealed, the southern and larger of which can still be seen today. Macalister and Duncan discovered that this tower had been built into the “Jebusite Bastion” at a later date. They believed it had been constructed by David,1 and they ascribed the top eight courses of the tower to a repair done later by Solomon. Kathleen Kenyon would re-excavate the base of the tower in her excavations from 1961-1967.
A smaller tower on the north had also been built into the “bastion.” Macalister and Duncan dated it to the “post-exilic” period. In the most recent major excavation in this area, the tower was removed by Eilat Mazar (more on that later), and only its foundation can be seen today. Duncan noted that a small wall running off of the tower and on top of the “Jebusite Bastion” may have been part of the repair to Jerusalem’s walls by Nehemiah (1924a:128), an interpretation that is still held by some scholars today.
It is important to mention that when we view the area of the Stepped Stone Structure today, we can only see the northern third of Macalister and Duncan’s excavations. They continued to dig for quite a ways southward beyond what is visible. They believed that their “Jebusite Bastion” continued to the south of the large tower. Therefore, in their reports, they refer to two different sections of this structure: a “North Bastion,” which is the landmark we refer to as the Stepped Stone Structure today and is visible in the City of David Park, and a “South Bastion” that extended south of the large tower and is largely out of view today. The south bastion had been badly damaged by later building activity, but Duncan wrote that it was the “much more massive” of the two bastions (1924a:127). Several lines of fortifications running north-south were preserved in this area as well. The possibility that the Stepped Stone Structure extends south of the large tower (perhaps much further south) goes unmentioned in some literature that discusses the monument.
In the next newsletter in this series, we will look at the legacy of Macalister and Duncan’s excavations both in the scholarly literature and on the landscape of Jerusalem, before turning to Kenyon’s excavations from 1961-1967.
Kathleen Kenyon wrote that Macalister renamed the monument The Tower of David (1967:19), but it appears that she is either exaggerating or simply intends to say that Macalister dated the tower to the time of David.
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Looking forward to this series, especially as this structure may or may not relate to the nature of the Biblical Millo.