Just below the best-known shrines of Jerusalem there are older sceneries driven into the ground, covered under floors, and disclosed in bits where it is necessary in some restoration to move that rock. Within these narrow underground passages, the city is less a monument than it is a palimpsest: hunt-marks beneath chapels, garden-soils beneath marble, and the worn-out pavements which served as burial-galleries of traffic in the past. To the early Christians, not only was Jerusalem remembered, but navigated. The locations below follow that physical connection-where geography determined loyalty, and loyalty determined geography.
1. The begar soil beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Excavators found evidence of cultivation under the floor of the basilica that suggests a green interlude to a hard, quarried landscape. Archaeobotanical and pollen analysis points to the possibility of the use of olive trees and grapevines in the area, implying that some portions of the area got agricultural use after the quarrying had subsided. Prof. Francesca Romana Stasolla wrote about low stone walls which divided the space and soil was packed in the gaps between them so that it could be divided into workable plots.
The location is significant in that it recodes the church precinct as a place that has used to smell of plants and wet soil and not just incense and stone. This later stratum is also appropriate to the long history of reuse of the site: excavation to field to grave to temple, each phase having a remnant, which was not removed as the next generation of archaeologists went along.
2. The Iron Age prey turned into holy land
The Holy Sepulchre complex is built on a quarry which was in operation long before the advent of Christianity by many centuries. The Iron Age has been observed by excavators, below the church, in everyday objects, in pottery, lamps, and small finds, which had become trapped in the disturbed soils of the later constructions. Article 3 highlights the project account by stating that the oldest identity of the site was industrial: limestone hewn out of uneven bedrock.
The result of that imbalance subsequently compelled construction workers to make rough surfaces smooth using fill, transforming the practical issue of irregular geology into a display of the latent architecture of the church. The postmortem of the quarry also speaks of the fact why the region might also contain tombs: unutilized mining areas created bare rock surfaces that could be easily carved into mausoleums. The outcome is a sacred topography, which at its start was labor rather than liturgy, and that has subsequently gained its spiritual seriousness.
3. The landscape of rock-cut tombs in the outer walls of the old city
The previous quarry zone was a burial ground that contained several tombs cut at different levels since the quarry was abandoned before the basilica was built. Stasolla explained the way a graded cemetery was formed in a stratified manner instead of a single, designed necropolis by the construction of tombs. In the Christian tradition, there is only one burial which can be attributed to Jesus, and the rest of the tombs are the recollection of the compound, one of the tombs belonging to Joseph of Arimathea.
The most important aspect is the spatial one: the devotional concern of the early Christian attached to a location that was predetermined by the rites of burial and logistical necessities of stone carving. Movement there would have been close, steps across bedrock, turns about cut faces, doorways to chambers, long before it became an enclosed interior with chapels and fixed ways.
4. The outcrop of Golgotha that was preserved still can be seen in the church
A very scarce fragment of exposed geology is preserved in the Holy Sepulchre, as a five-meter rocky outcrop, Golgotha. The fact that this rock survived even with the Roman-period rearranging of the sacred map of Jerusalem was pointed out by Father Amadeo Ricco. The meaning to early Christians is simple, the cult centered around the material that could be felt and pointed to, which was natural stone.
Making an impression on the city, where buildings were erected and taken down, the outcrop served as the anchor-a plain piece of land that retained a memory that was physically concrete. It is also present because of how subsequent builders sometimes preserved that which was already significant instead of covering it entirely.
5. The first monumental ring around the tomb
Excavators discovered a circular marble base in the current aedicule, which was believed to be part of the monumentalisation related to Constantine of the fourth century. The aedicule, Stasolla observed, was rounded in early representations, made in the fifth and sixth century, and this conformed to the shape of the recently announced one. This dimension, the size of which is approximately six meters in diameter, gives a corporeal dimension: it implies pilgrims walking round an established perimeter, as opposed to going to a single frontal shrine.
This type of architectural choreography was important in the early Christian practice since it directed feet as it directed thought, making veneration a circulation pattern. Although subsequent rebuildings changed the building above, that lost geometry left a hint on the way the original monumental church arranged closeness to the tomb.
6. The excavation levels are deep and squeeze centuries of Jerusalem
In the continuing excavation, in certain places the excavators have dug as deep as almost six meters beneath the current surface, uncovering what has been called compressed historical sequence, as described by Stasolla. These pits are not an independent place as much as a stratum of records: quarry scars, garden sediments, tomb cuts, and building layers forced into a single vertical column. The project also records the way modern conservation has created accidental openings into ancient movement when when the fill was being pushed to level out the bedrock in places where the builders did their work, floors were subsequently laid, and the present groups are reopening those seams in each zone.
To those who want to know where exactly the early Christians walked, the implication is that the floor kept on being renewed: as the generations succeeded to one another, a new floor was laid over an older floor, and the oldest paths are now buried under the church like a street of the dead.
7. The Pilgrimage Road rising from the Pool of Siloam
Elsewhere in Jerusalem, the City of David excavations have exposed a stepped stone street from the late Second Temple period known as the Pilgrimage Road. It runs for about 600 meters and roughly eight meters wide, stretching from the Pool of Siloam toward the Temple Mount.
While this route is most directly tied to Jewish festival movement, it also forms part of the urban stage early Christians inherited: the same city infrastructure, slopes, and valleys that shaped crowds and commerce. The tactile hook is the surface itself paving meant for bodies in volume offering a grounded way to imagine how Jerusalem trained people to move in processions long before later Christian routes were formalized.
Jerusalem’s best-known Christian landmarks often feel complete, as if they arrived fully formed. The archaeology beneath them tells a different story: landscapes reused, surfaces rebuilt, and meaning layered onto practical ground. What survives “lost beneath” is not only stonework but the evidence of motion cultivation walls, quarried cuts, tomb thresholds, and streets engineered for crowds quiet reminders that sacred memory has always depended on where feet could go.
