Jerusalem Large Stone Structure

Macalister and Duncan first excavated the summit in the 1920s as Field 5, and Kenyon expanded exploration northward in Area H during the 1960s. Their trenches left substantial architecture partly exposed but incompletely connected. Guided by those archives and a hypothesis that a royal building should lie north of the old city, Mazar opened renewed excavations in 2005. Her team found thick walls, floor sequences, pottery, a proto-Aeolic capital in nearby collapse history, and later administrative sealings, then published preliminary reports for 2005-2007. Because earlier trenches, later construction, and modern limits interrupted direct stratigraphic connections, subsequent scholars rebuilt the plan differently. The "Large Stone Structure" is therefore both an excavation designation and a debated architectural synthesis.

The proposed complex consists of massive wall segments, some two to five meters wide, constructed with large untrimmed stones at the ridge summit west of the Stepped Stone Structure. Rooms and surfaces around them contain deposits from several periods. Mazar's reconstruction joins the walls into a large public building extending beyond the excavation area and interprets stone collapse, ashlars, and a proto-Aeolic capital found by Kenyon as displaced elements of its monumental elevation. Critics note that half of so-called Room E and other walls are separated physically, while some elaborate masonry may align with Hellenistic fortification. The physical remains are real and impressive; the singular name can misleadingly imply that their unity has already been demonstrated.

Pottery beneath, beside, and above wall segments includes Iron I and Iron IIA material, with later occupation through the Hellenistic and subsequent periods. Mazar argued for construction near 1000 BCE and continued use, while Avraham Faust proposed an Iron I origin for a combined Large-Stepped complex that remained important into Iron IIA. Finkelstein, Herzog, Singer-Avitz, and Ussishkin assign some walls no earlier than the ninth century and others possibly to the Hellenistic period, stressing absent floor contacts. A recent synthesis still treats the summit as an important early monumental locus but records the competing models. Dating each wall separately is safer than assigning the entire excavation area one construction year.