Tel Dor Archaeological Project - PART 1

Featuring the participation of volunteers in the archaeology excavations of Tel Dor 2006/7.


Archaeology excavations in Tel Dor :

Originally a Canaanite city, Dor was ruled by a group of the Sea Peoples and settled by Phoenicians around 1100 BCE. Around 950, it became one of the 12 district capitals of Solomon and his main port on the Mediterranean. In 732, Dor fell to the Assyrian king Tiglath Pileser III, but was at once made the capital of the Assyrian coastal province of Duru. The town also prospered under the Achaemenid Persians, at a time when both Greeks and Phoenicians also lived within the walled circuit of the city. It briefly joined the Athenian Confederacy around 460 and was freed from Persian rule by Alexander the Great in 332. In Hellenistic times Dora, as it was then called, became an important fortress, which later (under Roman rule), was still of sufficient size and importance to issue its own coinage. A Jewish community is known to have existed at Dor in the mid-first century A.D. and, despite the town's undoubted decline in the Byzantine period, it was still the seat of a bishopric from the fifth to the seventh centuries A.D. In the thirteenth century A.D. a Crusader castle was built on the site.

For a site of unusual historical and archaeological digs appeal, Dor has received surprisingly little attention from archaeologists. Apart from limited archaeology excavations conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem in 1923-24, Dor only began to be examined in earnest in 1980 when the Hebrew University of Jerusalem launched the program of archaeology excavations which the U.C. team joined during the 1985 field season.