The fact that there is a hall of ages within the haphazard maze of tunnels and aqueducts beneath Jerusalem’s old city is not a great discovery.  Archeologists knew this hall existed for more than 30 years.  They Just could not enter the hall because ancient building techniques and materials left the place unstable.  The walls were buckling in and part of the ceiling had collapsed. Since thousands of years with no particular strategy in city planning left rooms, hallways and chambers stacked on each other, a collapse of this room could have meant a substantial cave in.

So, engineers pumped the room full of light concrete.  The name concrete gives an impression of the kind of building material you see on sidewalks, but that’s not accurate.  Three decades ago, the engineers thought ahead and concluded that one day they may want to enter that hall. So, the “light concrete” they used had the density of foam.  It could be cut away with a knife.  But the same problem existed; if you open the door and dig away the light concrete, the room falls in on you.

Two developments occurred that made it possible for archeologists to enter that ancient chamber. The first is that a window or door was discovered at the very top of the hall.  Now, instead of digging up from the bottom, they could dig down a little at a time and secure the structure as they descended.  The second is that the engineers developed a new type of mortar.  Experimenting with different resins and fibers they came up with something that would harden fast and strong enough to hold the ancient stones in place while they opened the hall again.  A steel framework was erected as well to make the structure safe for people to enter.

It was that simple and centuries of history were re-opened for discovery.  So much was discovered in this one room that site engineer Ofer Cohen said, “We changed a few of the Archeological books written in recent years.”  They could tell by the changing construction techniques that the room had been used and altered by nearly every group of people who stopped in or occupied Jerusalem. Early Jews, the Romans, Persians, Crusaders and Islamists. And apparently ancient people were very sloppy. It seems with every dig, researchers find chards of pottery and old coins which also show the researchers all the different people from all the different ages who entered that hall, hence the name it’s been given: the Hall of Ages.