The Temple Mount Sifting Project
Origins and Background: A Midnight Crisis The Temple Mount Sifting Project (TMSP) was born out of an archaeological crisis. In 1999, the Islamic Waqf, which manages the Temple Mount site, initiated a massive underground construction project to expand the el-Marwani Mosque. Using heavy bulldozers and excavators—and operating without archaeological supervision—they dug out a massive pit. Over 400 truckloads of soil, representing thousands of years of human history, were unceremoniously scooped up, driven out of the Old City, and illegally dumped into the nearby Kidron Valley like common garbage. For archaeologists, this was a disaster. Traditional archaeology relies on "stratigraphy"—the careful, layer-by-layer unearthing of items to determine exactly when and how they were deposited. Once bulldozed, that context was destroyed forever. However, archaeologists Dr. Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Dvira realized that while the context was lost, the artifacts themselves were still b...