Since 1986, a joint team, led by Professor Andrew Stewart of UC Berkley, Professor Rainer Mack of U.C. Santa Barbara and Professor Ephraim Stern of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have been working together. Their purpose is to uncover one of the richest sites in coastal Israel, King Solomon's principal harbor and a major Phoenician, Jewish, Persian, Greek, and Roman city, Tel Dor.
Dor is located in the coastal district of north central Israel. To the north of Pardes Hanna lie the Carmel range and the famed Carmel caves (where the excavation of settlements dating back to the Paleolithic Era has been in progress for over half a century). To the south, stand the dramatic ruins of Caesarea, the formidable seaport constructed by Herod the Great. Numerous other sites of interest, such as Megiddo, also lie nearby and Tel Aviv is only 50 kilometers away.
In biblical times, Dor was a like a magnet for commerce and conquerors alike. Today it is one of Israel's largest archaeological sites.
Dor was originally a Canaanite city. It was conquered by David and became one of the 12 district capitals of Solomon, and his main port on the Mediterranean. In 732 B.C., Dor fell to the Assyrian king Tiglath Pileser III, but was at once made the capital of the Assyrian coastal province of Duru. Prosperity is also in evidence under the Achaemenid Persians, at a time when both Greeks and Phoenicians also lived within the walled circuit of the city. 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.
The team's work at Dor focused on the forum/agora or
city-center of the ancient citadel (Area G) and the approaches to the Roman
temples (Areas F and H). Previous work at Tel Dor has already revealed the huge
stone gate of Solomon's city, cylinder seals from Assyrian times, numerous
terra cotta figurines from the Persian occupation, well preserved stone-walled
houses from the Hellenistic period and mosaic floors dating to Roman times.
While in the short term the excavations at Tel Dor are designed to reveal past patterns of social and economic life at Dor itself, the long range goal is to contribute to a regional study of adjacent parts of the Sharon Plain, in particular, of the Carmel coast.
University of CA - Berkley's Tel Dor Archaeological Internet Page http://www.qal.berkeley.edu/~teldor/index.html