Article: The 1000 Year Neighbourhood

I hiked up a dusty path leading to the ancient city of Jericho and stepped to the edge of a famous archeological wonder: Kathleen Kenyon’s trench. It is like a massive cake-slice into the ruins of the oldest city in the world. As a student the text-book images teased my imagination, there hunched under the buzzing fluorescent lights of my college library. But here, under the baking desert sun, I stood in awe looking down at the real thing. Layers of civilization, destruction, and time, were laid bare by Kenyon’s big dig down into this ancient mound. I was travelling with a professor who knew the place well, and she leaned over and asked if I wanted to go down and up close to the oldest building in the world. I knew what she was talking about. There, half revealed in the depths of the trench, stands the famous, “Tower of Jericho.” This massive stone edifice, which once loomed three storeys tall over the Jordan valley plains by the Dead Sea, was found intact under layers of history. By their estimates, this remarkable find is likely the oldest structure ever found, built thousands of years before Stonehenge, the advent of pottery, writing, and the wheel; around 8000 BC.

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