page_title: Tel Dor
section_title: Excavations
hierarchical_section_title: Tel Dor / Excavations
caption_attribution_description: English: \Eolianite beach Dor Israel
context_page_description: Tel Dor, is an archeological site located on Israel's Mediterranean coast next to modern moshav Dor, about 30 kilometers south of Haifa, and 2.5 kilometers west of Hadera. Lying on a small headland at the north side of a protected inlet, it is identified with D-jr of Egyptian sources, Biblical Dor, and with Dor/Dora of Greek and Roman sources.
  The documented history of the site begins in the Late Bronze Age, and ends in the Crusader period. The port dominated the fortunes of the town throughout its 3000-old year history. Its primary role in all these diverse cultures was that of a commercial entrepot and a gateway between East and West. The remains of the Arab village of Tantura lie a few hundred meters south of the archaeological site, as does the modern kibbutz and resort of Nahsholim.
context_section_description: According to IAA archaeologists, the importance of Dor is that it is the only natural harbour on the Levant coast south of the Ladder of Tyre, and thus was occupied continuously from Phoenician times until the late 18th century. According to Josephus, however, its harbor was inferior to that of Caesarea.
  Dor is mentioned in the 3rd-century Mosaic of Rehob as being a place exempt from tithes, seeing that it was not settled by Jews returning from the Babylonian exile in the 4th century BCE. Schürer suggests that Dor, along with Caesarea, may have initially been built towards the end of the Persian period.
  Tel Dor ("the Ruin of Dor") was first investigated in the 1920s, by John Garstang, on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. J. Leibowitz excavated in the lower town around the tel in the 1950s. From 1979 to 1983 Claudine Dauphin excavated a church east of the tel. Avner Raban excavated harbor installations and other constructions mainly south and west of the mound in 1979 - 1984. Underwater surveys around the site were carried out by Kurt Raveh, Shelley Wachsman and Saen Kingsley.  Ephraim Stern, of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University, directed twenty seasons of excavations at the site between 1980 and 2000, in cooperation with the Israel Exploration Society and several Israeli, American, South African and Canadian academic institutions, as well as a large group of German volunteers. With 100–200 staff, students and volunteers per season Dor was one of the largest and longest-sustained excavation projects in Israel. The eleven excavation areas opened have revealed a wealth of information about the Iron Age, Persian, Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.
  Current excavations are being conducted by Ilan Sharon from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ayelet Gilboa from University of Haifa in co-operation with the University of Washington,  the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of South Africa, and other institutions. It is a broad international consortium of scholars, jointly pursuing a wide number of different but complementary research objectives.
  Excavations at the site have thus far yielded an apparatus for the production of a purple dye solution, dating to the Persian and Hellenistic period, wherein there was still a thick layer of quicklime (calcium oxide) which served, according to scholars, in helping to separate the dye from the mollusks after they had been broken and removed from their shells. These mollusks were primarily imported into the region from other places along the Mediterranean coast, and consisted of species Phorcus turbinatus, Patella caerulea, Stramonita haemastoma, Hexaplex trunculus, among other species.
caption: Beach at Tel Dor
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