Border Police went into Silwan on Monday because families in the neighbourhood were fighting. Officers were working through the homes of everyone involved. Beneath one of the buildings they found a cave, and in the cave, graves.

Israel Antiquities Authority staff came out to look. Their reading, so far, is that the graves belong to the Second Temple period — the stretch from 516 BCE, when the rebuilt Beis HaMikdash was dedicated, to its destruction in 70 CE. The dating is described as tentative, which is the honest word this early, and it may narrow once the site has been worked properly. Police secured the cave and left the antiquities people to it.

What is worth pausing on is not the cave. Jerusalem is full of caves. It is that nobody was looking for it. There was no survey, no permit, no season of digging. There was a dispute between neighbours, and a floor, and under the floor two thousand years of Jewish burial in the city.

That is becoming a pattern rather than an anecdote. In July the IAA reported a mould for casting the face of a female figurine, First Temple period, and said it was the first production mould of its kind found in Jerusalem — recovered at the Kishle, an Ottoman lock-up on the grounds of the Tower of David Museum. In the City of David, excavators have been working through massive charred beams they believe came down in the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE. Three finds in a matter of weeks, and not one of them from a dig that set out to find that thing.

Which is the part that carries. Argument about how long Jews have been in Jerusalem is conducted, on both sides, as argument — claims, counterclaims, dates deployed against other dates. The ground is not participating in that. It simply keeps producing the same answer, in whatever order it happens to be disturbed: a lock-up floor, a collapsed roof beam, a cave under a house in the middle of a family quarrel.

None of it was staged, and none of it can be un-found.