Abstract
The history of the southern Levant in the early tenth century b.c.e. has been at the heart of well-known debates for more than a generation. Sharp disagreements concerning the affairs of the period reflect both the importance of this transformative time in the region's political and cultural development and the dearth and ambiguity of the evidence that might illuminate this past. The history of "David's Jerusalem" has been a point of intense interpretive divisiveness within these wider disputes.1 Yet lost amid arguments regarding Jerusalem's early Iron Age past have been moments of muted consensus. One of these areas of agreement is that Jerusalem was an inhabited highland site at the turn of the first millennium b.c.e. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]