Tel Dor, Area G Report

Tel Dor (Khirbet el-Burj) is an 8.5 hectare archaeological site located on a sandstone ridge approximately twenty-two kilometers south of Haifa on Israel’s Carmel Coast. The presence of three adjoining coves suitable as anchorages is likely the reason for the site’s settlement. The site was fairly continuously occupied (with a few short gaps) from the Late Bronze Age (13^th c BCE) into the Roman period (3rd c CE). Sporadic earlier finds suggest habitation at Dor began as early at the Middle, or perhaps even Intermediate, Bronze Age. Byzantine (and earlier) occupation off the tell is attested by remains of a church. The southwest corner of the site was occupied by a small Crusader fort in the 12^th and 13^th c CE. Except for occasional visitors (most notably Napoleon in 1799), the site has remained abandoned from the Mamluk period to the present.

Dor is mentioned in Egyptian records of the New Kingdom and later, notably the report of Wen Amun, which mentions it as a town of the Sikils, one of the Sea Peoples. The Bible lists the king of Dor as one of the Canaanite kings defeated by Joshua, but notes that the town remained Canaanite. It is mentioned again as the capital of Solomon’s fourth administrative district, but thereafter it disappears from the Biblical record. Presumably annexed by Tilgath Pileser III into the Assyrian empire in the later 8^th c BCE, Dor was an administrative center, mentioned in various Assyrian texts. In the Persian period Dor was ruled from Sidon, as can be learned from Eshmunazar’s funerary inscriptions. It was an important fortress under the Ptolemais and Seleucids in the Hellenistic period. While fought over by various Hasmonean kings, it is not quite clear whether any of them actually ruled her. Dor came under Roman rule after Pompey’s campaign in the area in 63 BCE. , and was the seat of a bishop in the Byzantine Period.

While the site was often ruled by outsiders, it is fair to characterize Dor, during most of its history, as the southern-most Phoenician site in the eastern Mediterranean. The site is of critical importance for understanding the birth of this civilization in the early Iron Age because of the extraordinarily detailed typo-stratigraphic sequence that was competently excavated over large exposures; more than any other Phoenician site in the Levant. As befits a Phoenician site, it also displays wide overseas connections in a period otherwise characterized by lack of such.

John Garstang undertook excavations at Dor from 1923–24 on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, but both his techniques and publication were rudimentary and incomplete. Excavations in the 1950s for the Department of Antiquities by Ja'acov Leibowitz uncovered part of a Roman theater north of the main tell and also the Byzantine church (further explored by Claudine Dauphin in 1979–83 and 1994). Avner Raban of the University of Haifa excavated some of the harbor installations on the south side of the tell from 1979–84 and underwater surveys have been conducted by many researchers from the 1970s up to the present, most recently by Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa. Excavations on the tell directed by Ephraim Stern of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with the participation of many other academic institutions, ran from 1980–2000. Excavations were resumed in 2002 under the direction of Ilan Sharon of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ayelet Gilboa and Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa, and S. Rebecca Martin of Boston University.

A comprehensive bibliography of Tel Dor can be found on the site’s home page: http://dor.huji.ac.il/index.html

Excavations in Area G

Area G is located in approximately the center of Tel Dor. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for locating an excavation in this area was to develop a sense the occupational history of the site away from its periphery, where other excavation areas were located. The primary excavations in Area G ran from 1986–2000 with shorter study seasons from 2002–04. From 1986–1994 the excavations were directed by Andrew Stewart of the University of California at Berkeley. From 1997–99 Jeffrey R. Zorn of Cornell University continued the excavations in G. Work from 2000–04 was directed by Ayelet Gilboa with Steve Weiner of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, and Avshalom Karasik.

Excavations in Area G covered an area of 22 5x5 m squares, or about 550 m². However, many of these squares were only briefly excavated (to the tops of features of Phases 1–2), while in some other squares excavation ceased before much clearance of the Iron Age. Excavation of the Iron Age developed primarily in the center of the area (Squares AI–AJ–AK/31–32–33–34) to a depth of accumulation of over 3m of debris, and the Late Bronze Age was reached in only small windows in AI/31–32 and AJ/32.

The occupational sequence in Area G is:

The final report for the Bronze and Iron Age phases (5 to 12) in Area G came out in three volumes in 2018:

The data sets presented here provide supplemental online documentation to these volumes.

The Open Context archive provided here includes all the original Area G locus cards (most of them hand-written in the pre-digital age) and all illustrations that appear in the final report volumes. They may be freely used and (re-)published with standard Open Context attributions.