Excavations at the Temple Mount

A number of archaeological excavations at the Temple Mount — a celebrated and contentious religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem — have taken place over the last 150 years. The first were undertaken by the British Royal Engineers in the 1870s.

Since Israel took control of the Old City in 1967, archaeological excavations in the vicinity of the Mount have been undertaken by Israel and the Jordanian/Palestinian-led Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. Both excavations have been controversial and criticized. Israeli and Jewish groups have criticized excavations conducted by the Waqf, the Muslim authority in charge of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Due to the extreme political sensitivity of the site, few archaeological excavations have been conducted on the Temple Mount itself. Protests commonly occur whenever archaeologists conduct projects on or near the Mount.

Aside from visual observation of surface features, most other archaeological knowledge of the site comes from the 19th century survey carried out by Charles Wilson and Charles Warren. Warren was one of the first to excavate this area, exemplifying a new era of Biblical archaeology in the 1870s. In 1930, R.W. Hamilton, director of the British Mandate Antiquities Department, carried out the only archeological excavation ever undertaken at the Temple Mount's Aqsa Mosque by the British Mandate, the excavations show a Byzantine mosaic floor underneath the mosque that was likely the remains of a church or a monastery. In addition to the Byzantine mosaic, R.W. Hamilton also found a paving slab in the floor bearing the image of a centaur, dated to the 3rd century CE. It is believed this tile may be related to pagan religious construction on the Temple Mount during the Roman Period (135–325 CE).

3rd-century Roman relief of a centaur reused as a paving stone inside Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In 1967 the Religious Affairs Ministry began an unlicensed excavation. Starting at the Western Wall plaza, workers dug northward, under the Old City's Muslim Quarter.

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