In November 1990, workers building a road in the Peace Forest at North Talpiyot, south of the Old City of Jerusalem, accidentally broke into an ancient burial cave. Archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority, led by Zvi Greenhut, conducted a salvage excavation and found a typical Second Temple-period family tomb containing twelve ossuaries, several inscribed. One of the most ornately carved, decorated with rosettes, bore, incised twice in Aramaic, a form of the name "Joseph son of Caiaphas" (Yehosef bar Qayafa), and held the bones of several people, among them a man of about sixty.
Because the tomb was excavated under archaeological control, the find has a secure provenance and chain of custody, the decisive contrast with unprovenanced objects such as the James Ossuary. The IAA accepts the ossuary as genuine on the evidence of its sealed context, patina and script; its authenticity is not in serious dispute.
What remains open is the identification. Most scholars connect the box with the family, and quite possibly the person, of the Gospel high priest, though some note the unusual spelling, the absence of any priestly title, and the possibility that it belonged to a relative. The atlas therefore records the object as attested in authenticity while treating its link to the high priest of the Gospels as a debated relation, a real find that illuminates, without simply proving, the world of the Passion.