Kathleen Kenyon excavated trenches in Jericho for six years from 1952 to 1958. She wanted to excavate in the layers of Jericho that was older than the time of the Israelite conquest so she bulldozed the layer which gave evidence of the conquest. At the time of the excavations Christians around the world were horrified.

‘Palestine Revisited’ by Alfred T. Schofield (Written about 1920) gives this curious account. The old City of Jericho including Rahab’s house, was bulldozed to get to the older archaeology.

Re-entering our carriage, we drive past Gilgal, now a mound of sand, over the camp of Israel’s conquering thousands, and reach modern Jericho, two miles to the north of Herod’s Jericho, and consisting of two small hotels and a few dilapidated houses. After some rest and refreshment, we proceed two miles North-West to the Jericho of Joshua’s day, where we reach the final climax of the day’s wonders.

Seven years before, our two-mile drive along a lane kept green by the sweet stream flowing from Elisha’s fountain at Jericho terminated at a pool like a swimming-bath, which is Elisha’s spring, whose bitter waters were made "sweet" 3,000 years ago by a "cruse of salt."

Behind them rose a fragment of stone wall that was pointed out as the sole remains of Joshua’s Jericho. There were even then, however, traditions amongst the Bedouin and inhabitants of modern Jericho to the effect that the sand-hills behind it marked where possibly the ancient Jericho might be found.

The legend ran that a city stood there once that was very wicked. One day an army, led by a powerful sultan, came and camped close beside it. The sultan rode round and round the city many times, and all the walls fell down and the inhabitants were killed.

How different the scene on our present visit. We pass behind the broken wall and there, before our eyes, lies the whole of the little fortress of the Canaanite Jericho of Joshua’s day, freed at last from the sand that has covered it some twenty or thirty feet deep for thirty centuries.

It is a crowded collection of small, sun-dried mud dwellings with a strong mud wall round it and a moat faced with rough stones outside. The wall and the houses are now gone, but you may walk round on the foundations of the city wall in about twenty minutes. It is said that the Austrian professor who excavated it found the top of the old wall at the bottom of the moat, showing it had fallen over or downwards (see Joshua vi. 20, "the wall fell down under it" (Heb). There is no sign anywhere of an earthquake. At the northern side of the little town there is a house built actually on the wall, or rather forming the wall at that spot, and this is clearly Rahab’s house, as there is none other in the whole circumference. When the walls fell, it is evident this house could not fall, as it was not a mud rampart; or wall but a house.

As I stood in Rahab’s front room (she appears to have had two rooms on a floor) I could see where she bound the scarlet cord as evidence of her faith in Jehovah and where she let the spies down into the moat from her window. Her house is supposed to have been a place of entertainment or small inn in Jericho, which she kept, for the word describing her calling has a wide significance. All about lay broken Canaanitish water-jugs, grindstones, balls of flint (thrown at Joshua’s army), and other genuine relics of Rahab’s time; but by now all these will have disappeared.