1. Jericho Tell
Top of the things to do list in town itself is Jericho Tell. Just 2.5 kilometers northwest of Jericho’s central square, opposite Elisha’s Spring (also known as the Sultan’s Spring) is the ancient 21-meter-high tell (settlement mound) of Jericho – also known as Tell al-Sultan.
Archaeological investigation on this site began in 1860, but nothing of true importance was uncovered until the British excavations of 1930-31. The real breakthrough came with Kathleen Kenyon’s investigations in the 1950s. She identified 23 occupation levels, with the oldest traces of human settlement dating from around 8,000 BC.
To the ordinary visitor, the remains of this early period in human history may not seem particularly sensational.
There are only scant remains of the famed Jericho walls mentioned in the Bible. The most noticeable feature is the broad trench archaeologists cut through the hill in order to investigate the various levels down to undisturbed soil.
2. Hisham’s Palace
This 8th-century palace was built by the 10th Umayyad Caliph Hisham in AD 724 but never completely finished.
The earthquake of AD 746 destroyed it completely, and the site remained forgotten until British archaeologists excavated here in 1937.
Numerous finds from the site, including the figural representations characteristic of early Islamic art, can be seen in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.
The palace is laid out on a square plan, with four ranges of buildings opening off an inner courtyard and no entrances on the outside.
Immediately north is a large bath house with a bare ceiling, which originally contained alternating male and female figures and had a roof borne on sixteen pillars.