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Garo Nalbandian

PILED HISTORY. This group of timbers was removed from the roof and dome of Al-Aqsa Mosque during restorations in the early 1960s. It was reportedly purchased by a West Bank junk dealer and then resold to a settlement, where it is now stored. The ends of 140 of the beams were sawed off for dendrochronological study, and others were analyzed with carbon-14 testing to reveal an expansive date range: The youngest beams were cut after the initial construction of Al-Aqsa Mosque, while others date to the First Temple period, from the ninth to seventh centuries B.C.E.