THE DISCOVERY OF THE KETEF HINNOM SILVER AMULETS was described by the excavator, Gabriel Barkay, in a a lecture at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Excerpt from the article in the Baptist Press News:

Then Barkay described for his audience how, in 1979, a group of 12-year-olds from an archaeology club in Tel Aviv had come to the dig. Barkay thought the children were “pesky.” One in particular, a boy named Nathan, was always “tugging on my shirt and asking silly questions,” Barkay said.

Barkay assigned Nathan to a far-off, unimportant task: clearing out an ancient repository cave to prepare it for being photographed. Nathan took to the task with a hammer and “expressed his frustration by hammering the floor of the repository.” Barkay recalled being quite perturbed when young Nathan, who had not been on task very long, tugged on this shirt to tell the archaeologist that the hammer had broken through the floor of the cave and there was something below.

Upon inspection, Barkay realized that what he had thought was the floor of the chamber was, in fact, the ceiling of another ancient chamber underneath. Nathan had opened up a chamber where Barkay would make his most renowned discovery.

Thank goodness for pesky boys.