Jericho

The ancient settlement mound of Jericho, known archaeologically as Tell es-Sultan, rises beside a freshwater spring in the Jordan Valley of the West Bank and is among the sites most frequently cited as one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world. Excavations led by the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s uncovered a massive stone tower and defensive wall dated to around 8000 BC, structures that rank among the earliest known examples of large-scale monumental building by any human community, built well before the invention of pottery or writing. The site's biblical association with the walls that fell before the army of Joshua has made it one of the most excavated and most disputed archaeological locations in the region, since the archaeological layers securely dated to the Bronze Age do not straightforwardly match the conquest narrative's traditional dating. Successive occupation layers stacked over thousands of years make the tell itself, apart from any single structure on it, a rare physical record of continuous human building activity across millennia.